Netscape's latest webserver 3.6 is broken. It does not provide a
correct PATH_TRANSLATED variable to CGI programs. We have contacted
Netscape regarding this issue, but as yet have not gotten a response.
Our recommendation is not to upgrade to 3.6 as there are many programs
besides Webinator which also rely on correct PATH_TRANSLATED information.
Here's a brief explanation of how Webinator works when when you do a search.
On a typical Apache site you might have the following disk setup:
The 'htdocs' directory is in /website/htdocs/
The 'cgi-bin' directory is in /website/cgi-bin/
1: A user asks for the URL: http://www.xyz.com/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/search/
2: The webserver will execute the program /website/cgi-bin/texis
3: Texis will look at the PATH_TRANSLATED variable to see where the
script is located and will get the filename /website/htdocs/webinator/search
4: Texis will see if there's a a current compiled script available by looking
for a file named /website/htdocs/webinator/search.vtx .
5: If its not current or doesn't exist, Texis will compile the source
code in the file /website/htdocs/webinator/search to create search.vtx
6: Texis will start execution of the file /website/htdocs/webinator/search.vtx
The reason this is so important is that is gives you a quick secure method of
creating and maintaining as many different search scripts as you want without
having to any server reconfiguration. It also should explain why Thunderstone
is so critical of Webserver software that does not fully comply with
the CGI specification .
Thanks,
Thunderstone