Permissions being reset

[Studiosoft]

I am not sure if this is the right place for this but I am sure you will soon let me know if it isn't.

One of my hosting companies uses cPanel as an access point to my shared server space and last night, all the permissions on my many Perl files were reset to 644. Is this something that the latest version of cPanel does, for some bizarre reason as this the reason being given by my host for all of the websites on that particular shared server being down.

 

[ankeshanand]

Sometimes, When Administrators use anything wrong in WHM, it affects all cPanel Accounts, But it should not take the Server down as 644 is read and execute, Just the write permission is missing. Maybe they updated something which resulted in Failure. To fix Files inside your cPanel, Use Terminal/SSH

chmod 755 -R /home/username/public_html/whatever

Change 755 to whatever permissions you like. R stands for recursive. If you are getting permission denied, its most probably due to root user Accessing and Modifying your files which gives him the ownership. In that case, You have to contact the Administrators only to get back file ownership!

 

[cPRex]

@Studiosoft - there aren't tools in WHM that would change permissions of only Perl files. This isn't something that would happen unexpectedly with an update. It's often very hard, or impossible, to see what changed permissions after it has already happened, but your host could set up a "watch" log on a file just in case this happens again.

@ankeshanand - I'm going to disagree with you this time - that command in your example would change everything under the "whatever" directory to 755, which may or may not be good for that particular user. It would be best for the user to sort through the files and only adjust the permissions on the perl files they want to use.

 

[Studiosoft]

Sometimes, When Administrators use anything wrong in WHM, it affects all cPanel Accounts, But it should not take the Server down as 644 is read and execute, Just the write permission is missing. Maybe they updated something which resulted in Failure. To fix Files inside your cPanel, Use Terminal/SSH

chmod 755 -R /home/username/public_html/whatever

Change 755 to whatever permissions you like. R stands for recursive. If you are getting permission denied, its most probably due to root user Accessing and Modifying your files which gives him the ownership. In that case, You have to contact the Administrators only to get back file ownership!

 

[Studiosoft]

I was not looking for a fix, I was only trying to discover whether this was a feature in cPanel or whether the host in question is simply incompetent, the conclusion from here and other sources is the host is clueless. I will be moving away from them ASAP.