Topic: pleasewait CGI generates 500 server internal error?

[Mike Schultz]

Up until yesterday, everything with my e-smith 4.1.1 manager was working fine.  Now, however, when I click any link in the left hand frame, I get error 500 server internal error.

What is confusing to me is that if I bypass the pleasewait CGI and go directly to, say, /cgi-bin/password instead of /cgi-bin/pleasewait?/cgi-bin/password, the password CGI executes and displays properly.  If I add /cgi-bin/pleasewait to the URL manually with no arguments, I get the 500 error.

All of the file permissions on all scripts in /etc/e-smith/web/functions are correct.  Likewise the symbolic links in the /cgi-bin directory.

I had installed the awstats package last week, but everything was working fine for several days after the install.  I'm not convinced it's related.

Executing pleasewait from the command line dumps the expected HTML without trouble.

Ideas anyone?
TIA
Mike Schultz

[Bart]

More people seem to have this problem. It happened to me today. Delved into the admin_error log:

 "cannot create temp file for here document: Permission denied"

The solution that proved succesful for me was giving /tmp the right
permissions (41755 instead of 41777).
This might not be the reason for your trouble with the manager, but check it nevertheless.

This dependency on /tmp is a common (linux) problem, and in the essg it is partely caused by the way that the pleasewait-script works.
 (as it's the only non-perl-script)

Bart

[Mike Schultz]

Thanks Bart, that finally solved the issue.  The permissions which work for me are 775.  This was a minor pain in the butt.

Mike

[Bart]

Nope, you have to set properties of /tmp back to 41777 (777 with a sticky bit)
Just noticed that otherwise webmail (horde/imp) won't work.

Not having 777 on /tmp might also cause other (web)apps to stop working, if these use /tmp for temporary files, while not running as root (and they preferable shouldn't),

Bart