Thunderstone Support Forums

Hi there,
I have Solaris 8 w. iPlanet 4.1 (formerly Netscape) with a /cgi-bin dir. set up in iPlanet that works just fine but during the Webinator 5.1 install I get the error below. Otherwise when I manually place the texis symlink in the cgi-bin folder (the failed install removes it) and try http://devappus.piog.com/cgi-bin/texis in the browser I can see "This is the default Vortex script: texis/testdb/index in your Webinator install dir...."

The error during install is:
----------
Stopping monitor processes.....done
Checking dir with a web fetch...failed, will try again
Trying again with file...*** Failed ***
The URL http://devappus.piog.com/cgi-bin/texis/ ... html?-dump
could not be fetched.
Possibly the CGI URL prefix (http://devappus.piog.com/cgi-bin)
or the CGI extension (none) is wrong.
The web server response was: HTTP/1.1 404 Not found
----------
I almost looks like the web server treats /texis/ as a folder and does not try to execute it...\
What's wrong here - is it an iPlanet misconfiguration?

Thanks!

... and when I look at the web server logs I see this:
"... trying to GET /cgi-bin/texis/installtest/func.html, cgieng_start_exec reports: cannot find CGI program /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/texis/installtest/func.html (Not a directory)"

That does look like an iPlanet misconfiguration. It should execute texis if you have /cgi-bin/ correctly configured as a CGI-BIN directory.

It does execute texis when I point the browser to:

.../cgi-bin/texis

but does not when the install script tries to call:

.../cgi-bin/texis/installtest/func.html?-dump

Seems like iPlanet gets confused and treats /texis/ as a dir. in the later case. Or maybe texis is not looking at the right dir. to locate the script it needs to execute?

You'd get a whole different message if texis was running but couldn't find it's script.
It would appear that iplanet isn't handling cgi virtual paths correctly. If iplanet can't be configured to do so you'll have to use another webserver or maybe run vhttpd on a different port and use that to access texis.

Thanks! I resolved it - it was iPlanet config...

Good to hear. Would you mind posting what the config problem was so that others that encounter the same problem will know how to fix it?

Sure: I was trying to enable CGI for an existing iPlanet instance and the way it was set up (with a connection module for ATG Dynamo app. server) it messed up the CGI functionality. I simply created another iPlanet instance through their web interface, running on another port and set up the CGI settings for that instance and the Webinator 5.1 install went just fine after that.