Plesk/suPHP/Joomla permissions problem

[JamieRW]

Hi,

I thought I had it figured out but now I'm not so sure... I need assurance/alternative suggestions to resolve before this drives me insane.

Plesk 9.2.3
Debian 4.0
Apache 2.2.3
PHP 5.2.0-8+etch16
suPHP 0.6.2
Joomla 1.5.15

Issue
New installations of Joomla extensions have what I believe to be incorrect file/folder permissions for Plesk/suPHP and Joomla to work correctly. They default to 644/755 but these files/folders appear unwritable to Joomla. So I chmod'd them to 664/775 and Joomla seems happy. Obviously this is an issue as Joomla is unable to manage new files/folders on the fly so I would like suPHP to apply permissions of 664/775 by default.

However I have also been told suPHP and Joomla should work correctly with permissions of 644/755. Have I just configured suPHP incorrectly?

Changing security options in suPHP.conf doesn't seem to do anything or do I need to change the unmask value to default to 664/775?

suPHP.conf

[global]
;Path to logfile
logfile=/var/log/suphp/suphp.log

;Loglevel
loglevel=info

;User Apache is running as
webserver_user=www-data

;Path all scripts have to be in
docroot=/var/www/

;Path to chroot() to before executing script
;chroot=/mychroot

; Security options
allow_file_group_writeable=true
allow_file_others_writeable=false
allow_directory_group_writeable=true
allow_directory_others_writeable=false

;Check wheter script is within DOCUMENT_ROOT
check_vhost_docroot=true

;Send minor error messages to browser
errors_to_browser=false

;PATH environment variable
env_path=/bin:/usr/bin

;Umask to set, specify in octal notation
umask=0022

; Minimum UID
min_uid=100

; Minimum GID
min_gid=100

[handlers]
;Handler for php-scripts
x-httpd-php=php:/usr/bin/php5-cgi

;Handler for CGI-scripts
x-suphp-cgi=execute:!self

vhosts.conf

# PHP version detected 5
<IfModule mod_suphp.c>
<Directory "/var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/demo/httpdocs/">
php_admin_flag engine on
suPHP_Engine On
suPHP_ConfigPath "/var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/demo/httpdocs/"
AddHandler php5-script .php
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php5
suPHP_AddHandler php5-script .php
<Files php.ini>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
php_value open_basedir "/tmp/"
php_value upload_tmp_dir "/var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/demo/httpdocs/tmp/"
</Directory>
</IfModule>

Any help to resolve once and for all would be most appreciated, j.

[GLOBAL MOD PLSE CHANGE FORUM SETTINGS TO USE 'LOGIN' NAME NOT REAL NAME!]