Re: Premature end of script headers

[Cameron Simpson <cs zip com au>]

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 09:00:08AM +0800, John Summerfield <summer os2 ami com au> wrote:
| > I don't know about ~/cgi/bin vs ~/public_html/cgi/bin. But I had your
| > problem, and it was an suExec one. They should have advertised loud and
| > clear, because a lot of people have the same problem! In practice, your
| > ~/public_html/cgi-bin and all the files in it, even though they nominally
| > belong to you (and indeed may have you as owner), must be writable ONLY BY
| > ROOT (or by somebody else having similar privileges as far as httpd is
| 
| 
| That's wrong.
| 
| This works.
[... enable CGI in the directories ...]

John, you haven't thought this through.

CGI is already enabled, otherwise the message "Premature end of script
headers" wouldn't be happening at all - instead he'd be seeing the
contents of his CGI scripts.

If suexec is involved it will readily produce the symptoms described,
because it happens during the CGI exec subsystem but logs its errors
to a separate log. This is a bit disconcerting to people who expect the
error_log to have useful stuff in it from misbehaving CGIs.

Doesn't mean it _is_ suexec, but if he has it, it's quite high on the
suspect list as its default install _will_ behave just this way for all
but the most perfectly owned and placed CGIs.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743        cs zip com au    http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/

The ultimate result of shielding men from the results of folly is to fill the
world with fools.	- Tom Biggs, DoD #1146, <tom biggs dscmail com>