Problems running NWNX under new user

[Squatting Monk]

'nother Linux n00b question here!

NWN runs fine under the Ubuntu user I created. However, I wanted to create a new user without sudo privileges so that my other admin can log in and start up the server when he needs. I made sure to set him as a member of the group that owns all the NWN files, and they are set to group executable. However, when I run nwnstartup.sh, I get this:

[Lokey]

You need the execute bit for some odd things, be sure group has that privilege at nwn folder on down (-R). Commands for such are chown and chmod (that's the allow writing logs part).
_________________
Neversummer PW NWNx powered mayhem

[Squatting Monk]

No dice. I got the same result after making everything group executable.

As a temporary solution, I set up an unprivileged user to own the NWN folder and created a bash script to open a shell as that user to run it with. Now we both can run it. I'd like to find a less kludgy system, though.

[acomputerdood]

posting the output of "ls -alR" done in your nwn folder would greatly help.

as would "id" and "groups" for each user in question.

[elven]

Please check logs.0/nwserverLog1.txt and logs.0/nwserverError1.txt.

That error usually means a hak, tlk or mod is missing/inaccessible.

[Squatting Monk]

logs.0/nwserverLog1.txt:

[acomputerdood]

the immediate problem is that the top level directory isn't writable to the nwn-admin group:

[elven]

nwserver unpacks modules to temp.X, where x is a number starting at 0 and incrementing for each running nwserver from the same directory. same goes for log.x.

So you'd have to make sure that all users can write to the parent directory (create new directories), for example via group access.

Note: I have never tried running two nwserver instances from the same directory and configuration. This might yield lots of problems with the .ini files, nwnx-specific logs and data, servervault issues, or nwn database file corruption.


Alternatively, way to set up multiuser nwserver could be something like this:

* Move all module-independent resource files to a global read-only path (for example /opt/nwserver)
* Create directoires each users' home that wants to run nwserver, and symlink resources into that, like so (cut for size to shorten example):

/opt/nwserver:
data/
patch.key
nwserver

/home/nwn1/nwserver:
data -> /opt/nwserver/data
patch.key -> /opt/nwserver/patch.key
nwserver -> /opt/nwserver/nwserver
modules/ (keep your local modules here)
nwn.ini, etc.

Or just copy all the files, they're not that big.

[eeriegeek]

Managing directory modes to that level is tricky, especially for a new unix user and an executable for which we have no source. Another way to do this (that I'm using) is to set up a "pseudo" user called nwn to run the server. You can "su nwn" to administrate it. If you only want your administrator to run the restart scripts, you can use the "sudo" command to allow them to run only certain things.

The method elven describes, using a duplicate directory and symlinks for the readonly data files works fine for multiple servers. I use it on my server for a test instance because it's a low end server slice with only 10 G of storage, I didn't want to duplicate all the bic and hak files.

[Squatting Monk]

D'oh! I'm such a n00b. The top-level directory not being writable was it. Makes sense. It was saying it couldn't unpack it because it couldn't create the temporary directory for the module.

Thanks for the tips on how to run multiple instances. May come in handy. I'm just trying to create multiple users so my other developer can test the module when I'm not around to start it up. There's nothing live right now, so I don't need to worry about multiple instances just yet.

Thanks for all the help guys. Until next time!