Problems migrating website

[SCTurnbull]

I have been asked to move an Actinic version 7 website and bring the hosting in-house. A new server was purchased and I installed the OS (Ubuntu), configured Apache2, Perl, vsFTP etc etc.

However having now tried to host the website I cannot for the life of me get it to work. All the perl files now cause a 500 Internal Server Error. I have checked the /cgi-bin/ directory and all .pl file permissions and they are all OK. I can even get perl to execute from the /cgi-bin/ folder although NOT Actinic's perl files. I've check Apache2's error logs and I'm getting 'Premature end of script headers' errors.

Has anybody else come across this issue?

Thanks in Advance

Stewart

[TraceyG]

Hi,

This message is normally displayed for 2 reasons, one the cgi timeout for the script is too short (if the script has not completed its function during a set time, it stops). You could try increasing the timeout that you have set at the moment.

The message could also be caused by not enough memory allocated on the server to run scripts. We recommend at least 16Mb.

Also make sure that you have POSTs to the cgi scripts enabled.

[SCTurnbull]

Thank you Tracy for your reply. I'm not quite sure that what you have mentioned is causing the problems though.

I am unable even to get Actinic's test script (cp000001.pl, the one that's uploaded when you click the Test button in the Advanced Newtork Setup dialog) to execute UNTIL I run the linux util dos2unix against the file.

As I've mentioned earlier other perl files seem to be ok. For example http://shop.ssri.co.uk/cgi-bin/test.pl

Thanks Stew

[Mike Hughes]

This sounds like the files might be uploading in the wrong format. There's probably a default mode setting somewhere on the server that configures it.

(someone else will probably know the details and might chip in of this sounds like a path worth pursuing.)

Mike

[SCTurnbull]

Thank you Mike.

The problem here was with my FTP Server, vsFTP.

I'll quote the vsftpd.conf file

# By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore
# the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII
# mangling on files when in ASCII mode.
# Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service
# attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd
# predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the
# raw file.
# ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol.
#ascii_upload_enable=YES
#ascii_download_enable=YES

Uncommenting the line #ascii_upload_enable=YES and restarting the FTP server has fixed the problem.