WebHosting Help

My first major "crisis" happened today on the web server. A customer notified me that their web form was giving an error. I looked into it, and soon discovered that form mail scripts across my entire server were failing with nothing more than a "premature end of script headers" logged in the error.log file.

My first test was to create a simple "hello world" perl file and try and call that from the cgi-bin directory. It didn't work.

My next test was to move that simple test.pl file to the webroot (httpdocs), and it worked. Now I isolated the problem. Turns out that suexec.log was throwing an error every time something was called from cgi-bin. It logged "commad not found in docroot".

Now, to retrace my steps and see what caused the problem. A night or two before I had upgraded Apache via Redhat's up2date utility. It was a security related fix, so I'm usually somewhat quick to apply those. My webserver also runs Plesk 7, and this is where the problem came in. Plesk runs a non-standard document/virtual host directory structure, and in order to allow suexec to work properly, there's a Plesk-modified suexec binary in the /usr/sbin directory. When I ran the httpd update, it apparently overwrote this custom binary with the standard Apache binary.

A simple re-copy of the binary fixed my problem. All is well in server-land once again.

Posted under the influence of [[John Lydon :: A No And A Yes]]

I was having a problem with very large (20 - 100MB) attachments floating through my mail servers. I found a way to limit the size of the message my users send out via SMTP (qmail). There's a file called /var/qmail/control/databytes which controls the maximum size of a message qmail will send. By default, this file contains a "0", which means there is no maximum. You can enter a file size (in bytes) to limit this to a sane amount. I chose 20 MB, which should be more than plenty.

This also limits the size of incoming mail attachments to local users. If the size is exceeded, the message will be rejected.

Posted under the influence of [[Teenage Fanclub :: Don't Look Back]]