Re: {bb} Best Path for bb and bbc installation

[Philip Clark <bblist@cannae.uklinux.net>]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 22:17, David Hay Currie wrote:
> I am somehow new to Big brother and even thought I have mine running when I
> started looking into installing plugging I see that sometimes the path are
> referred to different locations. I know it is more of a preference, but I
> was wondering what does the bb community prefer for the installation of bb,
> and what conventions are used.
> 
> In my case I created a user bb, and installed in the user's folder
> 
> /home/bb/bcc for the client
> 
> And I was going to install the server in /home/bb/bb or is it better in
> /usr/local/bbc
> 
> And what permissions you use for the folders
> 
> I had only installed the client in 3 Linux servers so it would be easier to
> move them now, and since my 2003 bb server runs fine I was going to move the
> server to a Linux server instead  so I can more easily include lard and
> oracle support (I would love those 2 to be easier to install in win32, since
> I got it up and running quite quickly)

As I think you may suspect, there isn't really a "best" location for
installing BB. Personally, I normally try and install in the place where
other 3rd party applications (those not included in the OS installation)
would go unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise. Often,
this is /usr/local but some distributions provide /opt or similar
directories for this.

I also have an aversion to installing in the /home directory. Mainly,
this is due to convention and history rather than any concrete
benefit. The BB user should not be a "real" user in the sense that
no-one should be able to log in as that user. Normally those users
(which are created to own daemon processes) will not have a home
directory in /home and will have a disabled password and shell.
It's also common, on multi-user systems, to have the /home
directory on a separate partition and mount that without execute
permissions to prevent users from installing and running arbitrary
software. Depending on your situation, this may not be relevant to
you.

As for directory permissions, the default is often 755 (everyone
can read and traverse, only the owner can write). For a machine
which is not exposed to the internet and does not have potentially
destructive users, I would consider that appropriate. Otherwise,
it may be advisable to restrict permissions further. The settings
that can be used on particular files may depend on the some of the
extensions that you may be running, but I would start with 700
on executable files and directories, 600 on other files, and
slacken restrictions where you get errors.

The exceptions to this are the "www" directory, the directories
above and those below it. They need to be accessible to your
web server user, as well as BB. If the web server user is added
to the BB user group, I would start with permissions of 750 on
BBHOME, BBHOME/www and most of the directories under it. The
BBHOME/www/rep directory, however, would need to be 770 because
the web server may need to write there.

Cheers, Phil.



-- 
Heisenberg may have slept here.

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