- What
is CGI?
- Do you
allow CGI to run on your servers?
- Whats
the correct path to perl?
- What
is the path to send mail?
- What
is the exact physical path to your root directory on the webserver?
- Why doesn't
my CGI work?
What is CGI?
CGI, Common Gateway Interface, includes programs that run on the server
to enhance the quality and functionality of a web site. There are many
resources on-line that allow the downloading of free cgi scripts.
( For instance: http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/
)
or ( http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/ )
Do you allow CGI to run on your servers?
We do allow running of cgi scripts on the servers, however they must conform
to our acceptable server resource usage policy. If we deem that a script
is using an excessive amount of server resources, it will be disabled.
Whats the correct path to perl?
Before a cgi script will work certain modifications must be made to them.
Certain paths must be specified in some scripts. After the "#"
in the first line of the perl script, the path to perl must be specified.
/usr/bin/perl should suffice for this path. Below is a printout of a "whereis
perl" from our system.
perl: /usr/bin/perl
What
is the path to send mail?
Another program that needs to be specified in many scripts is sendmail.
This is located at /usr/lib/sendmail
What
is the exact physical path to your root directory on the webserver?
The path to your root directory is:
/home/username/
Obviously,
substitute "username" with the login you were assigned when
you first received your account details. Also, keep in mind that when
you configure your CGI, that your /public_html is included in your path.
For instance, if you have a guestbook.pl script in your /cgi-bin, the
exact physical path to that file is:
/home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl
Why doesn't my CGI work?
Make sure when you upload the CGI file DO NOT upload in binary mode, instead
use ASCII mode. Uploading in binary will cause the server not to recognize
the scripts as executables. Most FTP clients will upload .pl or .cgi files
in binary mode by default so you will need to change this. You will need
to upload the scripts into your cgi-bin directory for security reasons,
however they will execute from anywhere within your account.
The last
step is to set the file permissions. This is otherwise known as chmoding
and can be done from most FTP clients. For specifics on chmoding you can
refer to our "chmoding
files" help section.
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