Re: CGIDEV Question

The ScriptAlias directive was already there, fyi, but that was a great idea
to check.

I tried to open a telnet session as you suggested, but I get a "Connecting
to mysystem...Could not open connection to the host, on port 80: Connect
failed"  error message.   I am able to open up a non-cgidev2 CGI program
(one I wrote from scratch) but just not the ones that used to work on the
old system. To my knowledge, these are the exact same programs as they were
on the old system. 

Can you suggest anything I might check to make the telnet mysystem.com 80
work as you suggested?  That sounds like a great lead to follow if I can
only make it work.

Thanks!    

Shannon O'Donnell


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2006 4:41 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] CGIDEV Question


> On the new system, when I attempt to open one of the /cgi-bin/MYPGM.PGM 's
> my browser does not know what to do with it and tries to save it to my
hard
> drive instead of opening it.  It's like it must be missing the
content-type
> value in the HTML.

My first guess would be that you're missing the ScriptAlias directive (or 
EXEC on the orignal server) so the web server is tryign to download the 
the program to your PC instead of running the program to get output.

Might be worth checking it out.

The content-type being the problem seems unlikely. If content-type is 
missing, I'd expect the server to return an error, not open up a download 
window!  The symptom would fit it giving the WRONG content-type, but that 
seems unlikely if you haven't changed the programs.  If you want to see 
exactly what content-type and other data is returned, you can use TELNET 
to run the HTTP session manually.  Here's how:

a) Open up a "run" prompt on your PC (Start -> Run)

b) Type "telnet newsystem.example.com 80"  (to connect to port 80 on the 
new system.... change the domain name as appropriate)

c) In the TELNET session type:

     GET /cgi-bin/MYPGM.PGM<enter>
     Host: newsystem.example.com<enter>
     <enter>

d) The server should respond with the document for download, including the 
content-type.  If the content-type is wrong or missing, then it could be 
that the CGI programs aren't setting it correctly.


> Now, it's been a long time since I played around with CGIDEV2, but it
seems
> to me that I remember you had to have some environment things set up for
it,
> or maybe a subsystem running for it?,  something in the background. Maybe
it
> was just as simple as porting the CGIDEV2 service programs?

You CAN set up a separate server instance for CGIDEV2, but it's not 
necessary and I've always thought it was a bad idea since it makes 
firewall management much more difficult, and requires extra resources from 
your system.

A lot of people do this for testing.  That way, they can take down the 
CGIDEV2 instance, and change it's parameters, and experiment without 
affecting the main server.

But, it's certainly not a requirement.