Re: user cgi-bin configuration

[Jake Morrison <jacob.morrison@example.com>]

Uli,

Ahh, the joy of using binary packages. You might be better off just 
compiling your own Apache. That's what I normally do.

You should be able to just unpack the apache tarball and
run configure, accepting the defaults (which will put things into 
/usr/local/apache, which will not disturb your existing config). 
You will need to specify the various suexec parameters when you 
run configure, as described in the suEXEC doc.

After that, you can set the UserDir stuff in httpd.conf and you
are ready to go. For the cgi stuff, you can use 
	AddHandler cgi-script cgi

That makes Apache execute anything with a .cgi extension as a CGI.
Then users can put CGI programs directly in their public_html directory.

I would give it a try, just 20 minutes for a compile....

Regards,
Jake


ulrike@example.com wrote:
> 
> > If you can trust the people who would be running the CGIs, you could just
> > use the standard CGI directory. That is easy enough to set up.
> > I typically run apache with user apache, group apache. Then you can use
> > group permissions to control access to the cgi-bin directory.
> 
> The script failed first in the standard directory, so I started thinking about
> CGIWrap for debugging and in order to cut down on reading and interpreting and
> thinking I wanted to follow their instructions like a slave ... but no way out
> of this one, I'll read, read, read, think, try, pull my hair, read ... and hope
> that one day I will be rich which all these accumulated skills ...
> 
> > If you can't trust the people to write the CGIs properly (and behave
> properly),
> > then you probably need to run suEXEC. I haven't run it myself, though, so I
> > can't give you any pointers.
> 
> Yes, it seems already to be running:
> 
> [Thu Sep  7 14:39:48 2000] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper:
> /usr/lib/apache/suexec)
> 
> So I will read these docs as well. Maybe this is the reason for some other
> strange behavior: If I try to access
> 
>    http://localhost/doc/apache/
> 
> I get: "You don't have permission to access /doc/apache/ on this server."
> 
> I can access them without problems via
> 
>    file:/usr/share/doc/apache/manual/index.html
> 
> > You might give some more details about your configuration.
> 
> Which information is needed? Which part of the configuration files?
> 
> It is now configured almost as debian potato testcycle 2 (maybe partly updated)
> spat it out, on the introductory page it says:
> 
> <quote>
> 
> Unless you changed its configuration, your new server is configured as follows:
> 
>    * Configuration files can be found in /etc/apache.
>      The DocumentRoot, which is the directory under which all your HTML files
>      should exist, is set to /var/www.
>    * CGI scripts are looked for in /usr/lib/cgi-bin, which is where Debian
>      packages will place their scripts.
>    * Log files are placed in /var/log/apache, and will be rotated daily. The
>      frequency of rotation can be easily changed by editing
>      /etc/apache/cron.conf.
>    * The default directory index is index.html, meaning that requests for a
>      directory /foo/bar/ will give the contents of the file
>      /var/www/foo/bar/index.html if it exists (assuming that /var/www is your
>      DocumentRoot).
>    * User directories are enabled, and user documents will be looked for in the
>      public_html directory of the users' homes. These dirs should be
>      under /home, and users will not be able to symlink to files they don't own.
> 
> </quote>
> 
> This I extended for public_html/cgi-bin dirs in the way mentioned in my previous
> mail. Then I know that apache is running as user www-data.
> 
> But I remember that some things had to be edited before apache would start up,
> the root directoy directive (is that the word?) was missing and some other
> things, ok, I will study the conf files once again extremely thoroughly ...
> 
> Uli
> 
> PS: Thanks for the replies!! :-)
> 
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