owner + group php, apache, owncloud, dokuwiki

Ok, let's take this one by one ;)

First, on the ReadyNAS a lot of processes that would normally run as separate users are run under the privileges of the user account "admin". This most likely was a design decision by NETGEAR, the reasons for which I don't know. Now that leaves us with the web server (apache2) and mysql running under the "admin" account and just as well I made my add-ons run and have their directories owned by that user as well.

Now, for everything that runs as a web service; like for example ownCloud and Dokuwiki; often there's a need for the web server (apache) to be able to write to at least some (ownCloud) or all (Dokuwiki) directories of the web application. The reason for that is that the web server is what you as a user interact with using your web browser. So everything that goes onto your ReadyNAS has to pass through the web server which in turn has to write the files, wiki pages, whatnotelse to the file system of your ReadyNAS. And to be able to do so, it needs to have proper permissions. The easiest way to achieve that is by using the "admin" account - which btw doesn't have nearly as much rights as the name would suggest. Of course you could try to change the ownerships/permissions of the different apps. Then you would have to fiddle with ACLs and stuff to give the web server read and write permissions to the changed directories again. So even if you managed to change the ownership properly, you wouldn't have gained anything since the web server would still be able to write to *every* web application you're running on the ReadyNAS.

Now for MySQL: I designed the ownCloud application in such a way that it would work with SQLite instead of MySQL out of the box. Since the ressources on the ReadyNAS are limited, it in my view doesn't make much sense to run yet another daemon (mysql) for the limited amount of users you're most likely to support on the ReadyNAS. Thus SQLite should be able to handle the job just fine. That said, ownCloud will of course run with either the included MySQL server or even an external one. However, when setting this up, you need to make sure that you're *not* changing the pre-defined path names for owncloud, since those given are already tuned to the installation on the ReadyNAS and aren't created by the integrated ownCloud installer itself (unless you by chance picked a path that already exists *and* has the proper ownerships/permissions).

Now, finally, if you were to change ownerships / permissions of the path names you listed above you'd most likely brick the web interface of your ReadyNAS since all the admin functions also need to be able to access and write to most of the directories you named. This is not only done through the web interface but also by internal scripts that are run periodically and other stuff. In short: Don't touch this ;)

To fix the permission problem with ownCloud, try running

chown -R admin:admin /c/.owncloud/.

Actually, this should have been done by the ownCloud add-on on installation (and I just checked, it does exactly that) so I currently have no idea why it seems to not have done this for you.

-Stefan