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📆 27 Jun 2026 09:45 UTC +01:00 ⌚ Last Updated: 27 Jun 2026
📕 860 words ⏳ 7 min.
🏷️#Rambling#Blogging

A couple of weeks ago, Amin, the best Fediverse admin to walk this Earth - the Fedi admins on Mars are extremely good at what they do - setup a static web hosting service for members of Polymaths Social. I got an account and was the first user to try and login, being the first, I encountered some small teething problems, which were to be expected.

Polymaths Pages (that’s what it’s called), is a Beta/Alpha, test thingy, so I was expecting some hiccups here and there. Amin has been encredibly helpful throughout all the problems. As soon as something went wrong, I PM’ed (private message) him and told him what I saw the problem as being; whether through Fedi or Signal, and I always got a very speedy response, especially for international communication, with a traveling avocado.

All of the problems were server side problems, but I did my best with limited knowledge to try and make life as easy as possible for the avocado extroudiner. I am hoping that what I am about to write is going to be a chronological account of the problems and how it got resolved.

Day One - Thursday 4th June

Day one was an interesting one. I was the first person to try and get logged in, and as such, I encountered all of the problems with user permissions and groups. I spent a couple of hours going backwards and forwards with Amin via Signal about the issue and slowly, but surely, the various issues and misconfigurations were resolved, and by the end of it, I was logged in.

Day one led to everyone else being able to login first time without any problems.

The first error message I was encountering was:

orbitalmartian@polymaths.page's password:

Which shouldn’t have been there, because the users were setup in a way that it use SSH keys to verify the identity of the user, as well as checking whether the current user and device are authorised to access the server by comparing against authorised_keys.

After this, I saw a related issue, but a new one.

Every time I went to login, it would tell me:

orbitalmartian@polymaths.page: Permission denied (publickey)

This problem was caused by the file authorised_keys having been named incorrectly - as authorised-keys . This didn’t solve the problem completely, because there was the same error message again. The problem, so it turns out, is that the owner of the directory was set to root, where it should be caddy .

I was then logged in, no problems whatsoever, until…

Day Eighteen - Sunday 21st June

In the seventeen days prior to the eighteenth day, I was happily plodding along, making changes to my website, and deploying it to the server and it being visible on the web, no problems. Until I pushed my changes on this Sunday.

I ran my deploy script and SSH’ed into the server, I could see that all the files were as expected in the server but when I went to view my website, I was given a 403 no access error. I sent a PM on Fedi to Amin and explained the situation, to whit, he got to work investigating the problem. An investigation that would take three days to get to the bottom of, but it was a simple problem to resolve.

Over the course of the three days, there was discussion in a Signal group chat about rsync copying reduced permissions from my local build. It seemed to be that the files on the server needed to have 750 permissions, so the command chmod -R 750 /var/www/<username> was given out as a fix to the problem. This seemed to work once, and then the very next day, the same problem occurred.

The group chat suggested to use --no-owner and --no-groups flags on my rsync command, which didn’t seem to fix the problem or make any difference. Another suggestion from Daniel was to add --chown orbitalmartian:caddy flag to rsync. This also seemed to have no effect.

On the third day, Amin noticed that the very first solution was the correct one, but the permissions needed to be 755 rather than 750 because the file ownership of child files wasn’t always the same.

Leaving the correct command to solve this problem being: chmod -R 755 _site/ locally or chmod -R 755 /var/www/<username> on the web server.

This solution has fixed the problem now. And apparently will make things easier for everyone in future.

As always, aliens are the ones who get experimented on by humans (or a sentient avocado in this case), but at least it’s for the greater good of Polymaths Pages.

I hope that when I go to build this blost, I don’t discover anymore problems, otherwise this post will be getting an update 😆. Hopefully this blost was enjoyable, I’ll catch you in the next one, whenever that may be. BYEEE!!!