Anybody still running Interchange on a Cpanel box ?

Interchange in cPanel Hosting Service

Lypha.com offers interchange in their installation of cPanel

I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this question and I hope the programmers of cPanel see this so they can tell me what to tell my hosting service. If they answer here I can direct Lypha.com admins to this post.

I have a question about the cPanel interchange auto-install.

It works nicely but it chown's the catalog directory to the user and cpanel group.

The user number and the cpanel group number

In my case it's 33200 and 502

If I use the cpanel filemanager to place a file in the catalog directory it is then owned by me and is tagged with MY group instead of the cPanel group.

You would think ok... no problem right? My file and my group. Just as it should be.

The problem in my case is that I ftp'd a tar.gz archive of an interchange catalog into a temp directory and unzipped it.

I made a backup of the auto-installed catalog and then copied my archive into the catalog directory, imported my database and uploaded the pictures of the products into the cart/images directory.

Everything seemed fine until I tried to edit the template with the interchange admin UI.

It could not write to the catalog files because now the group is no longer the cPanel group, it’s my group and interchange for some reason is only allowed to write to files in the cPanel group.

This is not logical because if you edit a file offline and upload it any other way than through the interchange interface then the file is tagged with the owner’s group name and interchange loses the right to modify the file.

I tried to get the admins to give the interchange server permission to write to files in my group name but it's like talking to a brick wall.

This seems totally out of the ordinary concerning interchange or for that matter to have a script I installed which is not allowed to write to my files that are in my group.


The makecat program which is used to create interchange catalogs talks about group options during the install routine.

See the SNIP from the makecat perl script at the end.

According to the makecat program, MULTIPLE GROUP is the best and I don’t think this is the way the cPanel auto installer sets things up and it is VERY HARD to use interchange when it cannot write your files should they land on the server tagged with my group and not the cPanel group.

Anyone have any suggestions as to what I should request the Lypha admins to do about allowing interchange the right to modify my files or am I just out of luck.


It’s seems as though the auto-installer is choosing the GROUP option instead of the MULTIPLE GROUP option.

Or maybe the auto-install IS choosing MULTIPLE GROUP and not “Putting each user in their own group, and placing the Interchange user in that group”.

All I know is that this makes things very hard to manage because I have to be very careful not to let a file get tagged with my group.

If there is something my hosting service can do to allow interchange to write to my files without causing a security breach, then I am asking to please help me get them on the right track.

I have interchange catalogs on other shared server hosting services and have never had this problem before.

If there is a setting in the cPanel interchange auto-install script to setup interchange so it can modify a users file then perhaps it could be changed so that it sets up the interchange catalog and to use MULTIPLE GROUPS the correct way?

--John

SNIP…SNIP…SNIP…

MULTIPLE GROUP or GROUP is appropriate when multiple users will be running
catalogs on the same server.

MULTIPLE GROUP is the best way. Put each user in their own group, and
place the Interchange user in that group. In this mode, only the user of
each catalog and the Interchange server may read database and error files --
files that may contain sensitive information. If the user's default UMASK
is 2 on a UNIX system, then this the most troublefree mode of operation.

GROUP mode causes all files to be owned by the Interchange user, with group
ownership set to the group the user belongs to. This allows the Interchange
user and each individual user to read and write the files associated with
a catalog, but others in that group may read files from a catalog. This
may not be secure, and may cause problems when the user creates new
files that must be read/write to the Interchange user.

USER mode is appropriate when only one user owns all catalogs running
on this server, and the Interchange daemon is run by the same user.

M) MULTIPLE GROUP
G) GROUP
U) USER