BackupPC Problem – Wrong User

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I recently moved BackupPC from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7. But when I browse to localhost/BackupPC I’m told
Error: Wrong user: my userid is 48[apache], instead of 984(BackupPC)

As far as I can tell, the BackupPC settings are exactly the same as they were before the move.

It seems htttpd is running the program as user apache rather than BackupPC, as required. Is there a simple setting in /etc/httpd/ that will tell httpd to run as a different user?

3 thoughts on - BackupPC Problem – Wrong User

  • It is not the BackupPC settings, it is your apache settings. The default setup requires that apache is setup to run as:

    User BackupPC
    Group BackupPC

    There are other ways to do this if you have to have httpd run as the apache user for other things, but the easiest thing to do (if you can), is to set the User and Group to BackupPC in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and restart httpd.

    I have not run BackupPC on CentOS-7 (I ran it on CentOS-6), I have not run it in 3 years, and my BackupPC machine(s) had no other things on them that needed to run httpd for any other reason .. so others might have better advise if your machine is not single purpose.

  • anax wrote:

    Thanks for the suggestion. I had actually seen suexec mentioned, but on looking for a simple example of suexec in action I could only find ones referring to CGI scripts.

    I found the official document <http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/suexec.html>
    extraordinarily complicated, and it was not clear if this program can actually be applied to BackupPC, since it refers throughout to CGI.

    I guess I’ll start by changing
    User apache
    Group apache in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and then later see if I can make sense of suexec .