* * * * *
                                        
                     And even in the hills, I can't escape
                                        
Never did figure out why the Dansie Shopping Cart [1] doesn't like our server
[2].

[Squid Eyeballs! Squid Eyeballs I say!] [3] [4]C called today (during dinner
in fact) asking if I had gotten anywhere with it. After yesterday [5] I
didn't care to get anywhere close to a computer (in fact, dinner consisted of
Thai curry, whereas everybody else went with the squid eyeball sushi—sigh)
but once home from dinner, I started looking into the problem a bit more.

After a few hours, I called Blech tech support to figure out why the simple
perl-based CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script wouldn't work.

After a few more hours, I found out some things:

  1. CGI scripts have to be owned by the account owner and group, not by root
     or any other user. I was unaware that Blech used the suexec [6] option
     of Apache [7]—an option I've never used before.
  2. The Blech tech support call center is not in India, but in Russia, some
     twelve hours away.
  3. Neither I nor the Russian tech support could get the Dansie Shopping
     Cart to run under Bleck. I suspect that it runs under an older version
     of perl and/or an older version of Apache.

Guess that means the customer will have to switch shopping carts.

Wheee!

[1] http://www.dansie.net/cart.html
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/01/14.1-2
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2005/01/15/thumb-squideyeballs.jpg
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2005/01/15/squideyeballs.jpg
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2005/01/14
[6] http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/programs/suexec.html
[7] http://httpd.apache.org/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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