SMATDB File Permissions

[Jonathan Souders]

Environment is Red Hat and version 6.2/19.1.

I wrote an API that is calling the hcsmatconvert command for a front end UI to convert SMAT database files to flat files due to some limitations some of my team members have with the database format. The API worked great in development, since I was running the app as ‘hci’, but now that I have deployed it to Apache, the permissions on the SMAT database files present an issue since they are owned by hci:staff with 644 permissions.

Some options I have currently are to run Apache as the hci user – which I would prefer to avoid, just based on best practice recommendations – or creating a cron job to modify the permissions on all *.smatdb*, *.ecd files in the process directories – this could be taxing and pretty involved as our environments change/grow.

Is there a way to control what permissions the smatdb files have from the engine? This would be an ideal solution, as opposed to what I have referenced above.

Topic

[Charlie Bursell]

Why not simply put Apache in the staff group?

[Jonathan Souders]

I don’t know why I missed this suggestion or why I didn’t think of it as well. Oh well, too late now.

Thanks anyway, Charlie!

[Author]

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