8 hours of frustration solved in 10 minutes with the right tool.
Warning: Geek Speak AheadÂ
I just completed a web site transfer for the church web site. We had been developing it on a separate domain on the server until it was ready to go live. When the time came to move the files I remembered that it is difficult to tar up the files and transfer them with permissions intact without ssh access.
I did up a php script which tarred it all up and then moved that to the new filespace, but php accessed from the web runs with the rights of the server instead of the rights of the user. That becomes a pain very quickly.
I tried to use the poor man’s ssh by running the php file through cron, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to function quite right. Believe me, I tried, but I just couldn’t get it to run like I have in the past.
I went for frame based redirect as a temporary patch, but that is never a satisfactory option when you know you can do it right.
I got ssh activated by the sysadmin and a quick tar / wget / tar later and I was ready to have everything in place.
Whenever you can, make sure your host allows ssh. And keep a good list of linux commands at hand.
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