Network setting driving me nuts!!!

[fatoftheland]

Hi all...

Please help me sort my poxy network settings out. Hosting on a Supanames Premier Linux package.

Using the settings below which no matter what I try, return the following error messages:

"The server name or address could not be resolved"

This happens when actinic gets to:

"Testing Normal Settings..
Testing CGI Script Settings.."

Then this message appears:

"The test script failed to execute on the web server. The error could be caused by several things. Check the path to the Perl shell, the CGI script extension, the path to CGI-BIN, and the CGI-BIN URL. This error could also occur if your web site is out of disk space or your web server is not configured to accept POSTs to CGI scripts."


Current Settings:

HTTPPROXYMODE 0
HTTPPROXYADDRESS
HTTPPROXYPORT 80
HTTPPROXYUSER
HTTPPROXYPASSWORD
FTPPROXYMODE 0
FTPPROXYADDRESS
FTPPROXYPORT 21
FTPPROXYUSER
FTPPROXYPASSWORD
SCRIPTID 1
SCRIPTEXT .pl
SMTPHOST localhost
WEBSITEURL http://www.wholesaleheating.co.uk
IGNOREPASSIVEERRORS true
USERELATIVECGIURLS false
PATHTOPERL /usr/bin/perl
USEENHANCEFTP false
FTPCLIENTTIMEOUT 5000
FTPRETRYDELAY 3000
FTPSILENT true
FTPMAXRETRIES 50
FTPCONNECTTIMEOUT 15000
SMTPAUTHREQUIRED false
SMTPUSERNAME
SMTPPASSWORD
CATALOGURL http://www.wholesaleheating.co.uk/acatalog/
CGIBINURL http://www.wholesaleheating/cgi-bin/
PATHFROMCGITOCATALOG ../acatalog/
CODEBASE ./
FTPHOST ftp.wholesaleheating.co.uk
FTPUSERNAME xxxxxx
FTPPASSWORD xxxxxx
PATHTOCGIBIN /cgi-bin/
USEPASSIVEFTP true
FTPPATHFROMCGITOCATALOG



Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

PS. Tried most suggestions which a search for supanames on the forum brought up.

[NormanRouxel]

Best hide that password (replace with ***************). Then change your FTP username and password as it's been made public.

[pinbrook]

Firstly please edit the above post to remove passwords etc, and requiest your host changes the password as you have broadcast it to the www.

Secondly check the permissions of your folders

acatalog 777
cgi-bin 755

[fatoftheland]

Thanks for the heads up norman! That could have had dyer consequences!

[NormanRouxel]

Make sure your cgi-bin was isn't set at 777. Many hosts prevent scripts from running from such wide open directories.

[fatoftheland]

permissions are set to:

acatalog: 777
cgi-bin: 757

I know cgi-bin is higher than 755 but this has to remain as it is or the other ecommerce site currently running on the server will not work...

You see we are changing to Actinic and need to test our new actinic site which is still in development stages while our existing site continues to operate.

We then aim to run them side by side up against each other to establish which e-commerce platform we should stick with and then scrap the loser.

We already feel actinic is way ahead but we need to get our customers opinions....

[fatoftheland]

hi norman.... would the same not apply to the acatalog directory?

[NormanRouxel]

I don't think so. You cannot run scripts from there - only serve web-pages.

[fatoftheland]

hmmmm ok makes sense. Tried contacting supanames, they've been about as useful as a blunt knife.... running out of ideas.

[RuralWeb]

We then aim to run them side by side up against each other to establish which e-commerce platform we should stick with and then scrap the loser.

You need to be carefull here, if google picks up both sites then you may be hit with a duplicate content penalty which usually means that the newer pages will be removed from the index.

[pinbrook]

You need to be carefull here, if google picks up both sites then you may be hit with a duplicate content penalty which usually means that the newer pages will be removed from the index.

just ensure you exclude robots from one of the sites then you can have both live for comparison purposes

All my test v8 sites have the following line in the head tags

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

[fatoftheland]

Thanks for the advice on the duplicate content, I was saving that for another forum post but now I already have my answer.

Still banging my head against a brick wall regarding these flamin' network settings.

I just dont understand it. All firewalls down makes no difference GRRRRR!

[RuralWeb]

just ensure you exclude robots from one of the sites

You can do this but that makes it a little harder to compare the two sites performance as one will be prevented from getting traffic from the search engines. Unless you use adwords - before you ask I dont have an answer as to how to effectively compare the two sites.

[pinbrook]

Agreed Malc,i was just talking about test/dev sites. I hadn't read into the post they might run 2 sites in parallel to determine the better solution.

However I would have thought that by using difference ecommerce packages you would pretty well eliminate the risk of duplicate content as the underlying code would be different.

[fatoftheland]

Any other suggestion on how to compare the two sites without excluding them from the organic listings?

We do use adwords, and will continue to use it, however I don't know about running campaigns against each other with different url's I don't think this will achieve much.... I guess if it can serve each campaign/ad 50% of the time then we may get an idea of how one site is more successful than the other. hmm.....