Apache/Perl question

[Ronny Serrano]

Thanks to everyone who pitched in with ideas on this. Turns out my
apache config needed to be tweaked a little. Then I was getting 500
errors. After 2 hours I found that it was because the damn Vi for
Windows was puttng the wrong carriage returns in the script and the
server was blowing up. The linux server just didn't like how the
carriage returns were formatted. When I write a simple script in vi
right on the linux box, it works fine.

Anyone know of a good freeware editor that would convert a windows
notepad formated text file to unix/linux format.

rs

-----Original Message-----
From: John Abreau [mailto:john.abreau at zuken.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2005 11:20 AM
To: Ronny Serrano
Cc: Ted Swoyer; discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Apache/Perl question


On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:22:15 -0400
"Ronny Serrano" <RSerrano at heartsonfire.com> wrote:

> please keep the ideas coming.I saw Nathan's suggestion, but I'm not 
> sure if that would help me at this point. If I'm getting these errors 
> should I get basic CGI/Perl working before adding in something else?

One thing that tripped me up recently was SElinux. If your kernel is
using it, it might cause this sort of problem.

Try checking for it with "ls -Z /var/www/htm;". On an older system, ls
will complain that it doesn't recognize the "-Z" option; if this
happens, then SElinux isn't a problem, and you can ignore this message. 

If you do have SElinux running, then you should see something like 

    -rw-r--r-- root root  root:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t  index.html

The triple after the user and group is the SElinux attributes. In this
case, index.html has the SElinux attributes

    user = root
    role = object_r
    type = httpd_sys_content_t

The type is the important one here; in this case, apache wants static
html files to have type "httpd_sys_content_t".  Looking in 
/etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts, I see the following
apache types:

    httpd_cache_t
    httpd_config_t
    httpd_exec_t
    httpd_helper_exec_t
    httpd_log_t
    httpd_modules_t
    httpd_squirrelmail_t
    httpd_suexec_exec_t
    httpd_sys_content_t
    httpd_sys_script_exec_t
    httpd_user_content_t
    httpd_var_lib_t
    httpd_var_run_t

I would imagine a cgi script would be either httpd_exec_t or
httpd_sys_script_exec_t. 

If your kernel is running SElinux and your perl script isn't one of
these types, you can change the type with chcon: 

    sudo chcon -t httpd_exec_t foo.pl

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John Abreau
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