Replies: 1
We run free version of Wordfence on 5 sites – 2 staging sites on a Centos Server running
Plesk
On our STAGING site, Wordfence update to 7.5.1 worked great.
Also on 2 other sites. And one other staging site.
BUT on 1 production site – which previously showed NO ERRORS when running a scan, or ANY other issues,
and has NEVER had an issue the past 2 years – suddenly gave this error when we try an
update (edited for security):
Selected items were updated with errors:
– Unable to update plugin ‘Wordfence7.4.141`’, details: PHP Warning: chmod(): Operation not permitted in [REDACTED]/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php on line 173
several hundred times.
SOLUTION (for everyone’s edification):
We discovered that SOMEHOW (in a previous update we think) that the
owner and group
of the Wordfence directory under plugins, AND ALL the files, had been changed
to
“root root”!
Under Plesk the group is usually psacln the owner is site owner username
Changing the Wordfence Dir and ALL files under wordfence back fixed ALL errors.
Again we don’t know HOW root became both between last update and the latest, but it did.
ALSO: the root root thing will also cause wordfence to give a “Scan Fail – Can not start sacn” error
Hope others find this useful
Sid