About Users and Groups

When you add a linux user it gets it's own group so say the user is called "bob" it will be in the group "bob" no need to add it to another group.

To add it to sudo use the visudo command and add

bob    ALL=(ALL) ALL

Under the bit where it says root.

As for dokuwiki you're opening a whole can-o-worms on what permissions and groups you should assign web stuff.

Personally I make a user for each of my sites and store the files in /home//public_html, the files are then owned and grouped by to , with 0644 permissions on files and 0755 on directories (owner writable, everything else readable).

Some people prefer to store them in the /var/www folder, what you don't want to do is allow the files to be writable by the web server, so don't chown www-data or whatever your webserver runs as.

I think I am going to do something similar to what you are doing.

All my webapps are stored in /srv/www/{example.com}/publichtml/{hypotheticalsubdomainnotcounting_www}. What I will do is create a new user and assign the webapps to his group with the appropriate permissions (755 and 644).

Thanks a lot for your answer.

A (perhaps) simpler approach is to use the admin group that Ubuntu* already has set up. You can add a user bob to the admin group with the command

usermod -a -G admin bob

and you're all set.

At least, Ubuntu 8.04 does, not sure about later versions. If the line %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL* is in your /etc/sudoers then this applies to you too.

That line isn't in later versions, or not at least on linode, I checked.

I confirm that the admin group is not in Ubuntu 9.10+ (9.10 being what I use). But I did create the admin group and added it to the sudoers like you specified (I actually found that trick on a blog post).

Anyway, thanks for the help ;)

That loud thumping sound is my head hitting the table repeatedly.