Hello:

I'm relatively new to linux.

I just installed Mandrake 10.0 on its own 40Gb hard disk.

I uninstalled the included mysql and installed the newest version I downloaded myself.

I set the datadirectory to be /usr/mysqldata. This directory is owned by mysql and belongs to the mysql group.

Everything works fine for a while, but after 20-30mins or so, the directory magically changes owner to root and to group root. MySQL can't access databases anymore so I have to manually chown and chgrp to the directory again.

This also happens to /usr/uploads which is a directory I created where a PHP script moves uploaded files from Internet. Only this directory is owned by apache and belongs to the apache group. After a while this directory changes owner to root and to the root group all by itself.

I created these directories in /usr because that's my large partition and that's where I need to store my information.

What is going on? Is there some process that automatically resets owners and groups? Is /usr a forbidden place to create my own directores?

Thanks for your help.

you might try using

/usr/share

and see if it does the same thing........there might be a script somewhere
with root permissions that it executing automagically........

The Mandrake security package (msec) will re-set the owner:group and modes for files that are listed under /usr every hour by default. To change the setting open the Mandrake control center, go into the security group and use the permissions option to set the /usr/mysqldata directory to be owned, readable and writable by your mysql user, if it gets changed to something else by accident, msec will re-set them to the values you enter. You will also need to do the same for /usr/mysqldata/* so as to get all the files/directories underneath to be set to the correct values as well.