Wow did I learn a lesson today from the techs at http://www.CanadianWebHosting.com (figure I'll plug them because they helped me beyond the actual support I'm paying for, but didn't charge me)
What I did know, was that php runs on my server as user "nobody" and that in order for me to be able to run Vshare I had to set file permissions to 777 on many folders and a few files. I never felt good about that because I always thought it left the sever open to compromise, since anyone with the knowhow could hack and write to the files.
I also know that suphp forces php to work as the user of the site, instead of use "nobody". But every time I turned it on, I started getting these "Internal Server Error 500" errors.
What I DIDN'T know was, if you are running suphp, you cannot have file permissions set higher than 755, so every file I had set to 777 was causing an error.
So today I'm going to go turn on suphp again to tighten up security, and then go through my sites and change any 777 permissions to 755. Ugh, I don't look forward to that, but I do look forward to having more secure servers.
When I'm done if everything is working well, I'll make a few posts in the wiki, under the installation, to clarify that
A) everyone SHOULD be running suphp (and Apache suEXEC which is different but also needed for security) and
B) how to set the permissions for Vshare so that the configuration errors don't occurr.
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