Permissions Problems - CentOS 6

Question

I'm a web developer and I manage my own server. Not an expert system admin, but I know enough to get by. Anyways, I gave a front end developer who is working on a project with me an account on my server. Everything was working fine, but then he started having permissions issues. Every file that he adds to the server gives only his account read/write permissions, and nothing for anyone else. So they can't be viewed on the server as you get a 403 error. He has mounted a drive via SSH and uses Transmit on his Mac and his permissions in Transmit are set to 644. I can add files from my account on my Fedora 17 install via a SSH mounted drive and they have the correct permissions. As you could imagine, it is extremely unproductive for me to have to login as root and change the permissions for every file he adds. Is there any setting on the server that could be causing his account to give only him read/write permission, or is there any way that I can force his files to have 644 permissions?

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but I'm a programmer first and a system admin by necessity. Permissions have always given me trouble!

Also, is there any way to log permissions changes? I don't think there is, but it would be extremely helpful if there was a way to see who/what/when permissions where changed on a file.

Answer 1

In Unix systems, the umask defines the default permission bits that will be assigned when a file is created. Setting this appropriately may help. You should have him perform an ls on his ssh mounted drive as well to see if he is seeing different permissions listed on his system than what is seen on the webserver.

You could also make use of a regularly running script or directory-watching script that change the permissions on his files for you when in the webserver directories. If you do go to the length of that, though, I'd rather suggest teaching him to log into the server and change the permissions on the files himself.