WordPress MU

I've spent the past few hours pouring over vhost config, htaccess, and folder permissions posts but now I've got ask for help.

I moved over to a VPS from a previously shared hosting. All files have been transferred over and the database reconstructed on the new host. I set up wildcards for sub-domains and after the DNS server changes propagated, the system delivers existing posts from all blogs with images correctly displayed. I was about to update to the latest version of Mu but wanted to work this out before adding more issues.

I get the following error message when I try to upload an image for (ironically) a 'Server Back Online!' post:

The uploaded file could not be moved to /var/www/vhosts/thedomain.com/httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/13/files//2007/11.

After researching here:

1. Set the permissions for blogs.dir and wp-content to 777.
2. Changed the PHP safe mode to off.
3. Removed the <Directory/$HTTPD_VHOSTS_D/thedomain.com/httpdocs>AllowOverride FileInfo</Directory> entry in my vhost.conf file because it looked similar the error output.
4. Tried itdamager's htaccess but it threw internal server errors so I restored the old one.
5. I restarted Apache and BIND a number of times after changes, including right before I wrote this.
6. I followed these steps one at a time to check their effect, which was none.

Here's my environment:

VPS server, Apache
Plesk interface
VHOST enabled, sub-domain install
located in root directory
Wordpress Mu 1.2.1

Here are some relevant entries in my logs (I can't really decipher them):

Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: http: //webmaster.thedomain.com/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=upload&post_id=91&ID&action&paged=

PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/vhosts/thedomain.com/httpdocs/wp-admin/admin-functions.php:1913) in /var/www/vhosts/thedomain.com/httpdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1344, referer: http: //webmaster.thedomain.com/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=upload&post_id=91&ID&action&paged=

Here is my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#uploaded files
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule . - [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

My vhost.conf now simply has:

ServerAlias *.thedomain.com

Any suggestions?

After continued reading I tried a solution mentioned in this thread. I should have just searched plainly instead of going for htaccess, vhost, etc.

The solution was chmod -R 777 blogs.dir. I didn't apply that recursively before.

Settings permissions to 755 as cautioned did not work.

That seems to fix the problem, but it seems like a brute force solution. Isn't this a security hazard?

Pumpkinslayer's fix has always worked great for us: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3173&page&replies=3#post-19388

To reproduce it here... ask your hosts to, ahem:

"# cd /wordpres_directory/wp-content
# chmod nobody:nobody -R blogs.dir
# find blogs.dir -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
# find blogs.dir -type d -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;"

Whatever that means ;)