Re: user cgi-bin configuration

[ulrike@example.com]

> If you can trust the people who would be running the CGIs, you could just
> use the standard CGI directory. That is easy enough to set up.  
> I typically run apache with user apache, group apache. Then you can use
> group permissions to control access to the cgi-bin directory. 

The script failed first in the standard directory, so I started thinking about
CGIWrap for debugging and in order to cut down on reading and interpreting and
thinking I wanted to follow their instructions like a slave ... but no way out
of this one, I'll read, read, read, think, try, pull my hair, read ... and hope
that one day I will be rich which all these accumulated skills ... 
 
> If you can't trust the people to write the CGIs properly (and behave
properly),
> then you probably need to run suEXEC. I haven't run it myself, though, so I
> can't give you any pointers. 

Yes, it seems already to be running:

[Thu Sep  7 14:39:48 2000] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper:
/usr/lib/apache/suexec)

So I will read these docs as well. Maybe this is the reason for some other
strange behavior: If I try to access 
 
   http://localhost/doc/apache/

I get: "You don't have permission to access /doc/apache/ on this server."

I can access them without problems via 	  

   file:/usr/share/doc/apache/manual/index.html

> You might give some more details about your configuration. 

Which information is needed? Which part of the configuration files?

It is now configured almost as debian potato testcycle 2 (maybe partly updated)
spat it out, on the introductory page it says:

<quote>

Unless you changed its configuration, your new server is configured as follows: 

   * Configuration files can be found in /etc/apache. 
     The DocumentRoot, which is the directory under which all your HTML files
     should exist, is set to /var/www. 
   * CGI scripts are looked for in /usr/lib/cgi-bin, which is where Debian  
     packages will place their scripts. 
   * Log files are placed in /var/log/apache, and will be rotated daily. The 
     frequency of rotation can be easily changed by editing 
     /etc/apache/cron.conf. 
   * The default directory index is index.html, meaning that requests for a 
     directory /foo/bar/ will give the contents of the file
     /var/www/foo/bar/index.html if it exists (assuming that /var/www is your 
     DocumentRoot). 
   * User directories are enabled, and user documents will be looked for in the 
     public_html directory of the users' homes. These dirs should be
     under /home, and users will not be able to symlink to files they don't own. 

</quote>

This I extended for public_html/cgi-bin dirs in the way mentioned in my previous
mail. Then I know that apache is running as user www-data. 

But I remember that some things had to be edited before apache would start up,
the root directoy directive (is that the word?) was missing and some other
things, ok, I will study the conf files once again extremely thoroughly ...

Uli

PS: Thanks for the replies!! :-)