Robert T wrote:AFAIK chown can only ever be user to change file ownership if run by root, so without root access you aren't going to be able to fix the ownership manually. You can however use chgrp to change the group of files you own.
You can't use chown, but you can change the ownership of files if you have write permissions on the directory:
mv foo bar
cp bar foo
rm bar
Will give you ownership of foo provided that you were able to read it in the first place.
The errors seem to be indicate that the scripts are owned by the user with uid 2025 (Tim's user account), and that the cache files are owned by the user with uid 33 (apache/httpd). This could have come about because part of the phpbb install is still owned by the apache user and only those files which Tim has changed recently are now owned by his user. The cache directories were then re-created by the apache owned script files, and now the ones Tim modified can't write to them.
But how did part of the install become owned by apache?
The scripts will get run as uid 33, irrespective of who owns them, so it's quite possible for those cache files to get created by phpBB, and then for them to be unreadable by other parts because their ownership doesn't match the ownership of the scripts so safe mode complains.
The only way I can see around this (other than by manually changing ownership as above) is to run whatever script creates the cache files as uid 2025, which is only possible if you have shell access to the machine.
The other possibility is that the ISP may have set up safe mode to do a group id check only, in which case you can fix it by changing the group on the files in question, but judging by the error message, I think it's doing a full uid/gid check.
Paul