customers cannot add items to the cart

[Hendrik]

Hi

My website www.grand-illusions.com was working last night and I have not done anything or made any changes. However this morning a customer e-mailed to say they could not add an item to the cart.

If I run the 'Test Network Setup' function, I get the following message -

You do not have write permissions to the cgi-bin directory "/var/www/cgi-bin/" or it does not exist.

When I try and run the 'Publish to Web' fuction, I get the following messages - 'the connection with the server was terminated abnormally' and then 'an error occurred while writing to the acatalog folder. Probably due to permissions.

When I try to refresh the whole web site, I get the connection with the server terminated abnormally, and then the following -

An error occurred while transferring files to the web site.

Possible Cause:
Network timed out
Network is down
FTP server is down
Remote server disk is full
The permissions on the file or directory on the remote
server are locked
If the file being sent is a CGI script
(nqxxxxxx.pl or caxxxxxx.pl) someone else may be
using the same CGI script ID as you.
Recommendations:
Abort
Resolution:
Re-establish your network connection
Be sure the FTP server is running
Try re-installing the web site when the network is not so busy
Make sure the disk is not full on the remote server
Make sure the website and cgi-bin directories
on the remote server are writable
Make sure the files in the cgi-bin and website are writable
Make sure your CGI script ID in the Advanced |
Network Setup... dialog is unique for your web server.

File: nq000001.pl5

_____________________________________________

I am on a dedicated server with Easynet, and the site has been live since November 2009 with no problems.

I have compacted the databases.

When I run the Purge and Refresh function, I get the following -

Actinic received a server error from the web server. The CGI scripts are not executing properly on the 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'
- the 'CGI-BIN URL.
- the amount of web space left on your server
- if your server is configured to accept POSTs to CGI scripts
- the permissions on the server:

On Linux/Unix based servers the permissions should be:
cgi-bin (755) – drwxr-xr-x
Online Store Folder (777) – drwxrwxrwx
On Windows based servers (need to be checked with the hosting company):
IIS
cgi-bin = read/execute
Online Store Folder = read/write/execute
NTFS
cgi-bin = Catalog's FTP account needs 'Change' permissions on the directory
Online Store Folder = Catalog's FTP account needs 'Change' permissions on the directory AND the IUSR_<servername> account needs to have 'Change' permissions on the directory

Run Web | Configure Web Site Details... to review your web site configuration.

________________________________________________

I have used ftp to look at the server, and the acatalog folder is set to 777 and the cgi-bin to 755.

I have looked at a lot of posts around this issue on the forum, but am not sure what to do next.

Have reported the issue to Easynet. Maybe a server restart would help?

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Hendrik

[Duncan Rounding]

If you've done nothing then it must be your hosting, and if so then there's prbably nothing more you can as you seem to have done all the basics.

I presume that the path to the cgi-bin is the same as it was yesterday?

[Hendrik]

yup - nothing has changed here.

Hendrik

[Mike Hughes]

It might be worth checking the file permissions within the folders as per your previous problem:

Hendrik01-Dec-2009, 10:11 AM
4) check the permissions on both of these cgi-bin = 755 acatalog = 777


I have just moved to a dedicated server (Linux box hosted by Easynet) and yesterday the guy who built the server switched the acatalog permissions to 775 because he felt there were security issues. This meant that whenever someone added an item to the cart they simply got a server error. (Things had been working up to that point!)

We switched the permissions on the acatalog folder back to 777, but this did not fix the problem. However different files within the acatalog folder had a variety of permissions attached to them. We have fixed the problem by giving every single file within the acatalog folder 777 permissions. However I wonder if we have lowered our guard more than strictly necessary?

Is there a definitive guide somewhere to the permissions needed by the files INSIDE the acatalog folder?

Hendrik

[Hendrik]

they still seem fine, i.e. cgi-bin at 755 and acatalog at 777

Files inside have a variety of permissions, but as I understand it I only need to worry about the overall folder permission, and Actinic sorts out the permisisons for the files inside the folder.

Is that your understanding?

Hendrik

[Mike Hughes]

The folder permissions set the default permissions for files within it.

But if a file has subsequently been set with restricted access then Actinic may not have sufficient rights to access it anymore.

So even though the acatalog fodler might be set to 777, if someone went and set all the individual file permission to 644 then actinic would no longer be able to write to these files.

The main reason I raised this though is that you found it fixed your problem the last time. I just wanted to check this isn't the same problem.

Mike

[pinbrook]

Actinic says acatalog folder and DD folder need to be 777, although some hosts will still run on 755.

Session files 200
html/cat/jpg/fil 644

cgi-bin 755
pl/pm also 755

[Hendrik]

Hmmm... funny how the problem is often in a different place to where you are looking.

We moved to a dedicated server last November, and it seems that although there is over 100GB of space on the drive, only 3GB or so had been allocated to the folder I had been told to load my web site into. So we had reached our allocation. That has now been fixed, and everything is working.

Thanks for all the input and suggestions.

Hendrik