Ubuntu 10.04, Drupal 7.0


I created a Linux instance on Amazon AWS using a bitnami Linux image, and had a website up and running using Drupal. Coming from a Windows background I wanted to use a GUI to manage files because it is much faster for me, I got Gnome running on TightVNC by tunnelling through ssh. (It took me a day to find out that the PuTTY private key is in a different format than the key AWS downloads - just a warning that others might find useful.)

The files I need to update in the website folder are created as root root, and I can't drag and drop into those folders from Gnome. So, I had this great idea. I would change the ownership of the files to "me". Knowing the pitfalls of chown (and obviously not all of them) I copied the directory and all of its contents to another directory as a precaution. I spot-checked that directory to make sure the group and owner remained as root root. I thought I was safe and could easily put things back to normal.

Well, changing ownership to "me" broke the permissions and the site. When I renamed the "mysite.bak" folder back to the original name, "mysite" I still had permissions issues. Here are the commands I executed.

sudo cp -r mysite mysite.bak *** to save my original files/permissions
ls -l *** to make sure mysite.bak still had root root ownership, and it did
sudo chown -R site me *** to change ownership

Trying to access the site through http, I got a permissions error:

Warning: include_once(/opt/site/apps/drupal/htdocs/sites/default/settings.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in drupal_settings_initialize() (line 554 of /opt/mysite/apps/drupal/htdocs/includes/bootstrap.inc).
Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening '/opt/mysite/apps/drupal/htdocs/sites/default/settings.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/site/php/lib/php') in drupal_settings_initialize() (line 554 of /opt/mysite/apps/drupal/htdocs/includes/bootstrap.inc).

Then, trying to revert back to last known good, I renamed mysite.bak to mysite.

sudo mv mysite mysite.bad *** because it didn't work
sudo mv mysite.bak mysite *** to restore to the original files/permissions

The site still didn't work, returning the same error. I have no clue what is happening here. Any help is greatly appreciated.

---------- Post updated at 10:45 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:21 PM ----------

Ok, the settings.php file had permissions set as -rw-r-----
So I ran
sudo chmod o+r settings.php

Now I have problems accessing the mysql database:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/opt/mysite/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock' (13) in lock_may_be_available() (line 165 of /opt/mysite/apps/drupal/htdocs/includes/lock.inc).