[Scottish] Apache weirdness

[Alistair Ross]

Hmm,

	Most obviously, it could be two things, both of them fishy on the ISP side of 
things:

	* The ISP is using a outbound proxy that is caching the content
	* The ISP changed servers and the DNS entry for the server has been cached 
and you are looking at the old server (weird - but it's happened before!)

There are other things it could be but these immediately spring to mind 
because I have seen them before. Other than that, get right back to basics, 
write a helloworld.pl script, check it works, then add something to the hello 
world script and reload it - has it changed?

Failing that, gimme the scripts and i'll pop them on one of my servers and we 
can see what it does.

Cheers!

Al.
On Wednesday 31 May 2006 18:23, John Gordon Ollason wrote:
> I have been trying to run some cgi-bin scripts written in Perl on the ccgi
> server at Plus Net. I have been getting seriously weird behaviour and Plus
> Net support is as useful as an udder on a bull, so I am posting here in
> the hope that some Perl/Apache guru can help me out.
>
> History: The script has worked fine under Solaris, NetBSD, and RISCOS in
> the past.
> The operating system of the cgi-bin server is supposed to be a Debian
> version, I think that the version of Apache is 1.3, and the Perl
> interpreter is perl, v5.8.4 built for i386-linux-thread-multi.
>
> It was not clear from Plus Net's documentation how the cgi-bin directory
> was supposed to be set up. One source seemed to imply that it was the
> user's root directory. This seemed odd to me, but I gave it a try and was
> not surprised when it didn't work. So I set up directory
>
> $mkdir -m 740 cgi-bin
>
> as required by the instructions. Put my script into the directory and
> chmodded the permissions to 750 as instructed.
>
> The script is invoked by the GET method transferring data via the
> $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} variable and everything works fine if (at the server)
> the script is invoked and the output redirected to a file as follows (bash
> shell)
>
> $export QUERY_STRING="...."
> $ script>temp
> $
>
> The file temp contains the html generated by the script together with http
> command prefix
>
> Content type: ...
>
> just as expected.
> The script includes the CGI::Debug module which detects no errors.
>
> When the script is invoked from the browser (any browser, lynx, konqueror,
> Opera, Firefox) the server picks up a buggy version of the script that was
> deleted from my filespace days ago, and also fails to pick up the
> QUERY_STRING altogether.
>
> Nevertheless the server does manage to return so html and this is where
> things get really strange.
>
> Trying to work out what is happening I dump the whole %ENV array at the
> beginning of the output. This gives the expected results including the url
> of the script that ought to be executed and the QUERY_STRING that provides
> the data, but the rest of the page appears to be generated by the buggy
> version despite its being deleted from my file space, and the output
> clearly has not been generated using the QUERY_STRING data.
>
> Two versions of the html can be found at
>
> http://ccgi.houseofdeer.plus.com/cgi-bin/shell.html
> and
> http://ccgi.houseofdeer.plus.com/cgi-bin/served.html
> The file served.html was saved from the browser and ftped back to the
> cgi-bin directory.
>
> It is as though the server is finding the first part of one script, and
> joining it on to the second part of another. I have never seen anything
> like this before.
>
> So my problem is this.
>
> How do I get the server to pick up the correct version of the script from
> the url where it resides?
>
> Has anybody else seen anything as weird as this?
>
> John Ollason
>
>
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> Scottish at mailman.lug.org.uk
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