Ack. That whole gid idea wouldn't work unless the user was a member of the same group as the web server. Pretty unlikely.

So maybe the best solution security-wise is either suid scripts, e.g. making sure MT is run through a wrapper.

-F

Unfortunately, my hosting service doesn't currently have cgiwrap or suexec set up. What I ended up doing was chmodding all the *.cgi files to 4751, having their uid/gid set to me, and then setting the umasking correctly as you described. I also set the permissions on things like the database and the various library files that the cgi scripts rely on so they are not accessible at all to world. This seems to work great.

Hi,

Not sure which is the appropriate forum to post this, but thought this was as good as any...

I've been looking at all kinds of different blogging software over the past week or so. Movable Type looks like a very nice system, but I have some qualms about making a lot of my directories, files, etc. world writable for the system to work. My web account is on a unix server with full shell access and this would open up these directories/files to anyone else with an account on the server.

Other than using a wrapper program such as cgiwrap is there any way around this? It seems one possible solution would be to set the uid on these files/dirs to your own and the gid to whatever process the web server runs under, then chmodding everything 775 or 664.

I guess my reason for posting this under Bug Reports is that I would consider having world writable permissions a fairly large security flaw and I was wondering if there was a rationale for the current choice or had been any discussion of this. I couldn't find any in the support forums...

Thanks!
-F

Yes, for the best security run MT using either cgiwrap or suexec. Both work very well. Then in your mt.cfg uncomment the 4 umask lines to set the permissions of the files and directories created by MT to not be world-writeable.