I have no _www Group I need help

Question

OK Guys,
Here is my problem, I have been having problems with virtual hosting. The only site that works of course is the default. I was reading on pg 40 of the Web technologies manual and it talks about the _www group and how I need to give those sites permission with the _www group. But I don't have that group. I need to know how to either get it or to configure something to get it. Thanks so much
kcam1999

Answer 1

While you may or may not be comfortable operating within bash, I find it easier than Server Admin for some tasks.
Launch terminal.app and enter:
+id www+
and you should see something akin to the following:
+$ id www+
+uid=70(_www) gid=70(_www) groups=70(_www)+
That's the www (or _www) group that the manuals discuss.
I use chown and chmod here to ensure ownerships and protections are correct; these are shell commands.
I prefer to not allow www (or _www) write access to most directories; write access is how a small and successful web server breach can potentially be expanded from a beachhead to a full-scale breach. As a rule, I have www (or _www) in the group mask, and allow the group (only) read (or maybe r=read and x=execute). The file owner is another user (eg: root), and that user has rwx read-write-execute access.
Here (and the following commands may or may not be appropriate for your web enviroment!), that would be something akin to the following settings:
+cd YourWebDirectoryPath+
+sudo chown root:www -R *+
+sudo chmod u=rwx,g=r,o=r -R *+
This may be far more detail than you want, and do use great care here as you can cause some serious configuration damage with command mistakes made at the bash prompt.