webstersprodigy.net

I am doing some research that involves a *lot* of google searches. Because this research involves a significant number of directed queries, it seems logical to hide this information as much as practical. If there is a web host who notices sequential names in a Google referer URL repeatedly, this might raise suspicion or alter behavior which could skew results. Similarly, it is desirable to hide IP information from both the web host (for similar reasons) and possibly even search engines.

On our multi-user system, one where we have 300+ users all with usermod enabled, we also happen to have other web services running. It’s inconvenient and in some ways insecure for everyone to be running their dynamic web stuff as the same user. One problem in particular is php. suexec was built for cgi-bin stuff – but php is a whole other beast. That’s what I’m talking about here – getting php to run as the user who owns it. More specifically, this will show how /home/user/public_html/myphp.php will run as “user”, but stuff in /var/www will still run as www-data.

In the old days, things like EDITOR could be set using environment variables (eg setting it in ~/.profile). I tried to do this recently, and when it didn’t work I investigated.