Thunderstone Support Forums

Hi,

Your install instructions explicitly say that Webinator should be installed as the user who will run it.... which sounds easy... but how can I positively confirm which user will actually be running texis under normal cgi operation? Can you offer simple test that will show which user is calling texis?

I tried installing Webinator as root, but after installation received "Internal Server Error" message and never made it to the monitor (no log files, no license).

So I deleted that and reinstalled as apache, with the same result.

So I deleted that and reinstalled as nobody, with the same result.

So I deleted that and reinstalled as myself, but that failed too.

My server is running Centos 4.5 / Apache under Plesk 8.2 with Virtuozzo.

That sounds more like an issue with possibly missing a library rather than a user issue. Will the texis executable run from the command line?

If libraries are missing try installing any "legacy support" or similar rpm's for centos. Or get them from ftp://ftp.thunderstone.com/pub/linux/

Also check the webserver's error log to get more detail about the error.

Make sure you downloaded the correct version. You probably need "Linux 2.4l2.2 x86". The output of "uname -a" will let you know if you need the x86_64 version.

To answer the question about discovering the user though...
Create a script like below in your cgi directory. Make sure the "#!/bin/sh" line is the very first. Make the script executable with "chmod a+rx yourscriptname".

#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-type: text/plain"
echo ""
echo "User test one:"
id
echo "User test two:"
who am i

Great! Thank you. Now I understand a bit more... this Plesk / Virtuozzo / centOS server runs suexec, so the solution was to simply install as a typical unprivileged user.

There were were a couple of minor install issues that had me confused in my first attempt at the install:

1) The install script failed to copy texis to cgi-bin, but as soon as I copied texis to cgi-bin, then the monitor started working.

2) Vortex complained that it could not find installtest, but I just ignored that detail, opened up the admin panel, and indexed the site.

There is one very odd point that perhaps you could shed some light on... when I tried to run the site index using the domain name, all I got was a "document not found" error. But, when I used the IP address instead of the domain name, then the site indexing went perfectly. Perhaps it is related to Plesk / Virtuozzo virtual server's nameserver, which is secondary to the actual network nameserver??

Nonetheless, the search capability is all working fine and the system is happily serving search results.

The install was a bit problematic, but Webinator is FANTASTIC!

Thanks.

Yes, sometimes DNS is mal-configured in such situations. When properly configured the DNS used by the internal server will resolve to an IP that will work from the inside and global DNS will resolve to an IP that will work from everywhere else.

Although Webinator seems to be indexing fine when using my IP address rather than my domain name, there are some puzzling issues.

When the install failed to make it past the copying of texis to the cgi-bin, I simply quit the install program, manually copied texis to the cgi-bin, and then logged in via the admin screen and began indexing.

However there are apparently some other details that the install program did not finish:

1) I notice that there is a webinator directory in my web site's html directory, but the only thing in that directory is a an empty bin directory.

What files need to be in that directory, and what is that directory used for?

2) Browsing to http://mysite.com/cgi-bin/texis/install ... html?-dump fails, saying "vortex error" and the vortex log says: "002 2007-09-12 12:06:23 /installtest: Cannot open source file: No such file or directory"

There doesn't seem to be any file called installtest. What's missing? Is there another way to run that test? (I'd like to see the values that it returns.)

3) Using the IP address for indexing has the side effect of presenting all of the search result links expressed in terms of the IP address, rather than my domain name.

Can you recommend a simple way to modify the walk or search script in order to present the search results showing my domain name rather than my IP address?

4) My server is running CentOS 4 / Plesk / Virtuozzo. Can you suggest any troubleshooting or modifications that might allow the indexer to properly use my domain name rather than the IP address?

thanks.

1) the documentroot/webinator directory should contain several gif files used in the admin and search interfaces. If they are not there you should be able to copy them from the installdir/webinator directory. The documentroot/webinator/bin directory will normally be empty.

2) That's only during install. You'd have to set CGI Debug to 1 in texis.cnf for that url to work. Doing so allows anyone to find out the same information about your server which is generally considered a breach of security so it shouldn't be left that way.

3) Preferable would be answer 4 below. But you could replace the ip with the name before displaying $Url in the search script.
<sandr 'YOURIP' 'YOURNAME' $Url><$Url=$ret>

4) If you can't get the ISP to setup DNS correctly you could create an entry in /etc/hosts for your machine. Then Webinator would be able to index by name.