no documents found (non-standard location installation)

[bogo]

I've installed texis as
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/pub/cgi/texis.cgi
that appears to work properly

I've installed some webinator databases under
www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/admin/webinator
and indexed some things. As an example, I've
indexed www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/v2-5/index.html
using the default database "db". (I've removed the
.htaccess file from that directory if you wish
to look at that database yourself.)

according to some obscure reference I found in the
documentation, I should be able to do this, and then
a proper search URL would be
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/pub/cgi/texis. ... tor/search
that works up to a point: I get the search form,
but no matter what I search for, I get "no documents match the query." I see the index got some information,
so a search for something like "integerp" should return *some* results.

any ideas why the correct database isn't getting searched?

-bogo

[Kai]

One of the first things to check with a Vortex script that behaves unexpectedly (the Webinator search form is Vortex) is the HTML source of the output: look for comments that have error messages, as this is how Vortex reports them (it also tries to log them to vortex.log in the database dir). I notice the message "can't open /u/www/users/moore/acl2/admin/webinator/db/SYSLOCKS: Permission denied in the function getshared", which is a file permissions issue.

Make sure the user that runs CGI programs such as texis.cgi has full permissions to the database(s) and files within. This should be the same user that gw (the Webinator walker) is run as: you probably ran gw as a different user and now the Web/CGI user can't read the database. Chown and setuid gw to the CGI user, and chown all databases and contained files to the CGI user.

[mark]

View the source of the results page. You will see permission errors.
make texis.cgi setuid to the user that owns the database and that you run gw as. All texis processes must run as the same userid.

chown THEUSER texis.cgi
chmod u+s texis.cgi

[bogo0]

thanks for the information, mark and kai!

I had actually checked user permissions as my first
step, but figured that world read permission on the database (in a directory that has world read and execute
permission) should be enough. (the texis.cgi script has world execute permission.)

What exactly are the issues here? It appears that
the search requires write permission to the file
SYSLOCKS, so as long as that file is world-writable,
(or group writable by the default group of the webuser id) the setuid bit does not need to be set. Is that all, or are there any other files that need more than
read permission for a search to be successful?

-bogo

[bart]

Texis is a SQL database, and it's possible for Webinator to be writing or updating records while the search interface is reading them. SYSLOCKS coordinates multiple processes and ensures that you don't get a "dirty read" .

You can probably extrapolate all the other issues/consequences from this.

[John]

If you take a look at the source to the HTML page that is returned then you can often find the reasons for such things. In your case the database the script is looking for does not exist.