Bug#420101: mod_dav fails to open the lock database because ownership of /var/lock/apache2 fails to set properly

[Darren Griffith <griffith@exoweb.net>]

Package: apache2.2-common
Version: 2.2.3-4


With the modules dav and dav_fs enabled, trying to write a file to a webdav resource fails with this error:

[Fri Apr 20 11:15:40 2007] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Fri Apr 20 11:16:30 2007] [error] [client 192.168.12.1] The locks could not be queried for verification against a possible "If:" header.  [500, #0]
[Fri Apr 20 11:16:30 2007] [error] [client 192.168.12.1] Could not open the lock database.  [500, #400]
[Fri Apr 20 11:16:30 2007] [error] [client 192.168.12.1] (13)Permission denied: Could not open property database.  [500, #1]



It fails because, after installing the apache2.2-common package, the ownership of the /var/lock/apache2/ directory is:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 20 11:54 /var/lock/apache2/

whereas, according to its postinst script, the ownership should be:

drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data root 4096 Apr 20 11:54 /var/lock/apache2/


Inside postinst, we see this:

# Make sure /var/lock/apache2 has the correct permissions
if [ -d /var/lock/apache2 ]; then
        chown www-data /var/lock/apache2
fi

but I'm not sure why it doesn't execute properly at installation time.


Suggested workarounds:

(1) run "chown www-data /var/lock/apache2" manually. Or,

(2) run "dpkg-reconfigure apache2.2-common", which sets the ownership properly.


apache2.2-common depends on:

apache2-utils, net-tools, libmagic1, mime-support, lsb-base, procps


I'm using:

Linux debian 2.6.18-4-486 #1 Mon Mar 26 16:39:10 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

and:

libc-2.3.6.so


--
Darren Paul Griffith, IT Systems Administrator
www.exoweb.net, +86 135 2262 5129