[htdig] Help recovering from an OS update on my server

[jon g. <han...@ya...>]

I have been using a dedicated server leased from a major provider for almost nine years. The server uses a FreeBSD OS and runs Apache server. We installed ht/Dig (Version 3.2.0b6) about 8 years ago and it has been working like a charm since then. We have done no maintenance on ht/Dig nor changed any configurations on it since then -- so we are a little (read--a lot!) rusty on this...

Recently my provider decided that it was necessary to upgrade the OS to FreeBSD7.2 -- since then the htsearch function called from the web interface has been able to access the search data but ht/Dig has not been updating. 

ht/Dig was originally set up to update by calling rundig via a crontab twice a day. I have since reset the crontab to run rundig, but this did not seem to help. So,as a test,I ran rundig from the command line. This returned a strange error, "File /usr/local/etc/htdig/htdig.conf not found." When I checked, sure enough the htdig folder was there but the htdig.conf file wasn't. (There is a file called "htdig.conf.sample" in the folder.) The htdig.conf file is actually in the /usr/home/username/htdig/conf/ directory.

So question #1 -- Where did the htdig.conf file in the etc/ directory go -- or why is rundig looking for it there?

Since at this point this seemed like kind of an academic question and I really wanted to know if I could get an update going, I decided to run rundig from the command line using the -c option directing it the htdig.conf in the /home directory. This seemed to run the update but resulted in the following:

mv: rename /home/username/htdig/db/root2word.db to /usr/local/share/htdig/common/root2word.db: Permission denied
mv: rename /home/username/htdig/db/word2root.db to /usr/local/share/htdig/common/word2root.db: Permission denied
mv: rename /home/username/htdig/db/synonyms.db to /usr/local/share/htdig/common/synonyms.db: Permission denied

and resulted in wiping out the old htsearch data (..searches now result in an Internal Server Error)

I checked the permissions on these directories using ls -l:
/usr/local/share/htdig/common/ :
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  512 Mar 19  2009 common

/home/username/htdig/db/ :
drwxr-xr-x   2 putka  users  1024 Mar 29 20:49 db

Attempts to chmod these directories have failed with a "permission denied".

Question #2: Is this just a directory permissions problem (i.e. did permissions and root access change when the OS was updated?) and if I can resolve this can I just continue to use ht/Dig calling rundig with the -c option -- OR is this all a waste of time and I need to reinstall, reconfigure, recompile... (which obviously I don't really want to do.)

Many thanks for your time in reviewing this and for any expert input I can get.

Jon