Re: Apache CGI Distress

[Darren Clark <darren@clarkwebdevelopment.co.uk>]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 08:32:41PM -0400, Gene Grimm wrote:
> After a major site update amounting to renaming the public_html folder,
> and tightening up security by removing global permissions, I am now
> getting errors trying to execute Perl scripts through Apache. All the
> HTML files are properly displayed with rights 640 and ownership assigned
> to user.www-data. The scripts have rights 750 with the same ownership.
> The browser shows a "permission denied" message for /cgi-bin/vcounter
> and /guestbook/guestbook.pl but the error log shows nothing for
> /cgi-bin/vcounter.The log shows "ExecCGI is off in this directory". I
> have rechecked httpd.conf several times and I have "Options ExecCGI" in
> the <Directory> groups for both the cgi-bin and guestbook paths. I have
> even restarted Apache several times. What might I be missing?

Make sure at the beginning of your httpd.conf that you do not have a default restrictive command in your httpd.conf. An example restrictive default is:

    <Directory />
    Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    AllowOverride AuthConfig
    </Directory>

As you have mentioned for the directory running the cgi scripts needs to have the correct permission 750 should be fine. Double check that in your httpd.conf file you have the directive similar to:

     <Directory /home/server-www>
     Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
     AllowOverride AuthConfig
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
     </Directory>

Darren