[support] immediate installation errors

[Larry Garfield]

On Thu, 31 May 2007 09:26:05 -0400, Tim McGeary <tmm8 at Lehigh.EDU> wrote:
> Earnie Boyd wrote:
>> Quoting Tim McGeary <tmm8 at Lehigh.EDU>:
>>
>>> Quoting Jason Flatt <drupal at oadaeh.net>:
>>>
>>>> On Wednesday 30 May 2007 20:45:30 Tim McGeary wrote:
>>>>> Currently the directory permissions are 755 and the ownership is
>>>>> apache.apache.  I've also tried 777.  No luck either way.  The entire
>>>>> drupal directory tree that is extracted from the tar file is owned by
>>>>> apache.apache and is 755 permissions.
>>>>>
>>>> This may be a silly question, but what owner and group is the web
> server
>>>> running as? Are you sure it's apache. and/or .apache?
>>> The web server is definitely running as apache, owner and group, and
>>> is defined the same way in httpd.conf.
>>>
>>
>> Is it a SELinux system?  Google for ``selinux site:drupal.org''.
>> You'll find this http://drupal.org/node/50280 and others.
> 
> No, it is CentOS Linux.  I didn't find anything useful in googling like
> you wrote except replaced selinux with centos.

Ah, there's your problem then. :-)  SELinux is "Security Enhanced" Linux, a kernel module with user-space configuration.  It was developed by Red Hat and the NSA, and is a more fine-grained and tighter permission system than the default users/groups setup.  It's installed by default on Red Hat systems these days I believe, as well as some Red Hat derivatives including, yes, CentOS.  

My company used to use CentOS on our servers, but dropped it a while back specifically because its SELinux implementation was broken and kept causing all sorts of trouble for apache.

If you're having trouble with other PHP apps, too, then I would definitely put the blame on SELinux/CentOS at this point.  SELinux is hard to get right unless you really know what you're doing.  IME, CentOS does not. :-)

--Larry Garfield