Webinator Problem at www.sis.gov.eg

[Thunderstone]

Dear Sir,

We have installed Webinator on our web servers, and it was working just
fine untill we had errors.
to view this error please access the following URL:

http://www.sis.gov.eg/cgi-bin/test


The Error Message:
Error: Could not connect to /pages/webinator/db

The following is what we have done before error appeared:

A UNIX shell script has been prepared which will re-initialise the
database for http://www.sis.gov.eg/. This script is currently in the
root directory and is called UpdateWebinator. Its contents are as
follows :

cd /pages/webinator/bin
/gw -d/pages/webinator/db -wipe
/gw -d/pages/webinator/db http://www.sis.gov.eg
/gw -d/pages/webinator/db -index
cp /pages/webinator/db/* /webftp/public/pages/webinator/db

Note the "unexpected" location of the gw program and of the database.
The "chroot’d" environment operated by our web server (The Fujitsu-ICL
WebServer) requires a second installation of Webinator. Although the
pages are really under /webftp/public/pages, the /webftp/public part of
the path is invisible when the web server is running; the webinator CGI
program would fail because it requires complete path names. Therefore
the script forces gw to use an alternative database directory as
specified by the -d parameter.
The script’s last action is to copy the database files from the working
directory into the directory where the webinator CGI program expects to
find them.



We kindly appreciate your corporation

Best Regards
Rami Labib
Network Administrator

[Thunderstone]

Your database directory and/or files are not accessable by the webserver
userid. The Webinator cgi runs as this userid and must be able to access
the database directory and files. Make the database directory and files
owned by the webserver user. If your webserver ran as a user called "web"
you could issue commands like this:
cd /webftp/public/pages/webinator/db
chown web . *
chmod u+rwx .
chmod u+rw *
Or you need to make the directory and files word accessable:
cd /webftp/public/pages/webinator/db
chmod a+rwx .
chmod a+rw *


A better procedure would have been something more like this:
cd /webftp/public/pages/webinator
/gw -dnewdb -create
/gw -dnewdb http://www.sis.gov.eg
/gw -dnewdb -index
rm -rf olddb
mv db olddb
mv newdb db

Webinator version 2 simplifies the above to one command line:
gw -d/webftp/public/pages/webinator/db -rewalk