I was having trouble with starting freeswitch the usual way: ~# service freeswitch start because of an error in one of the configs. So I decided to run it manually from the command line so I could see the error output. And guess what? That causes the databases to be owned by root! Of course, this means that freeswitch will ALWAYS fail when starting as a service because it can't access the database. I only confirmed this after doing: ~# su - freeswitch -s /bin/bash and starting freeswitch again, which presented the tell-tale read only errors that I was suspecting. It also started a race condition,with freeswitch endlessly trying (and failing) to write to core.db. I also discovered that using php-ssh to access files does the same thing, after using Pydio to view logs and suddenly they were owned by root as well. The solution I've gone with is: 1. Give ownership and SGID of all web-accessible files to www-data 2. Add freeswitch to the www-data group 3. Always 'su - freeswitch' if I want to run freeswitch directly to see errors from the shell I'm not sure if that's the best way, but it's working well so far. I'm also finding Pydio and Gate One are a great combination for a purely web managed freeswitch install. Francis