cgi bin protection

[aranshearsby]

Hi,

It has been suggested that we protect our cgi bin. We have looked in the actinic forums but have not found how to do this. Could someone please explain why the cgi bin should be protected and point us in the right direction as to how to protect it.


Many thanks

Aran

[jont]

You may like to clarify with whoever has suggested the need to protect the cgi-bin for their reasons.

Protecting the cgi-bin could be through security reasons (executing vulnerable code) or most likely for an SEO reason in prevent search engine spiders from crawling the links through the cgi-bin and getting lost. There is a lot of debate about this and general consensus is that the modern spiders are capable of avoiding the cgi-bin and not getting stuck ... however .... good reason also suggests there is no point allowing the spider in there as it can do no good and the time spent on your site can be better served elsewhere. As ever there are conflicting ideas.

Controlling the access to the cgi-bin is generally done using a .htaccess file uploaded to the root of the webserver - this is for *nix servers. Check out this forum for info on the .htaccess file and/or on the internet.

Malcolm (ruralweb) has written quite a bit on this subject on this forum and is well worth reading his posts (and the replies by those that offer differing advice)

HTH

[aranshearsby]

Hi Jont,

Thank you for your info. We will read the posts regarding .htaccess and as you suggest will decide whether it is worth protecting the cgi bin.

Many thanks

Aran

www.stuartshearsby.com

[pinbrook]

Controlling the access to the cgi-bin is generally done using a .htaccess file uploaded to the root of the webserver - this is for *nix servers. Check out this forum for info on the .htaccess file and/or on the internet.

or create a robots.txt file and disallow access to the cgi-bin - this will prevents spiders from enering the bin.

although I would ask the person who told you to protect the bin exactly what they mean and what are you protecting yourself from