Help with Cricket [RedHat Linux, Apache2, Perl-5.8]?

Tue Jan 11 19:04:59 PST 2005

I confess that my prior exposure to Linux (in general) has been quite
limited, and that I have never before tried to do anything with
either Apache 2.x or Perl 5.8.  For those who do not know, my recent
background (since Feb 1998) has been primarily in FreeBSD.

An acquaintance mentioned that he wanted to have a better idea than
he currently had ("currently" based on representations from his ISP)
regarding the utilization patterns for his T-1 from UUNet.

It seemed to me that Cricket would likely be a simple approach that
would address his concerns quickly and easily.

The acquaintance in question is presently using RedHat Linux on the
machines to which I have access; he seems reasonably comfortable with
it at this time, though he does not have on-staff sysadmin help, and
appears to do some sysadmin-ish things himself, or hires other things
out.  (I had recently set up a caching-only name server for him to take
the place of one on a machine whose disk drive had died.)

It seems that I have grossly underestimated the challenge in store for
me in getting Cricket installed, configured, and running.

I was finally(!) able to get the various bits and pieces required for
Cricket installed.  And I made an initial stab at the configuration,
along with setting up the data gathering.

But when I tried to look at the results (via a Web browser), I got the
infamous "Internal Server Error" back from the Web server.  (I got this
far last night.)  It wasn't until I did an "ls -ltr" in /var/log/httpd
that I noticed that the file "suexec.log" was being updated along with
"access.log" and "error.log" -- and that "tail suexec.log" showed:

[2005-01-11 17:45:43]: uid: (509/cricket) gid: (509/509) cmd: grapher.cgi
[2005-01-11 17:45:43]: directory is writable by others: (/usr/local/cricket/public_html/cricket)

OK; fine.  "chmod g-w /usr/local/cricket/public_html/cricket" took care
of that.

But I got similar symptoms on re-try; suexec.log now said:

[2005-01-11 17:56:20]: uid: (509/cricket) gid: (509/509) cmd: grapher.cgi
[2005-01-11 17:56:20]: command not in docroot (/usr/local/cricket/cricket-1.0.4/grapher.cgi)

Oh, joy.  :-(

As noted, I had not had occasion to deal with Apache 2.x or suEXEC before.
According to my reading of the docs at www.apache.org, it seems that
suEXEC should handle CGI scripts that reside in UserDirs, but the
message would appear to indicate otherwise.

Those docs at www.apache.org indicate quite a few configuration options,
but they look as if they are compile-time options.  And I don't see much
way to determine what compile-time options were used to configure a
running instance of Apache.

I found one Web site that indicated that if suEXEC were in use, one should
copy the CGI scripts to the "DocumentRoot" -- which strikes me as a
very strange thing to want to do, at best.

I ran across some other pages that indicated a possibility of a problem
with Perl 5.8, though I do not know if that might also be an issue.

So:  is there some plausibly rational way to install Cricket on a RedHat
Linux system using Apache 2.0.46 as the Web server and with Perl 5.8 as
the installed Perl, so that the whole thing works (and does not disrupt
other services using Perl and/or Apache)?

[I am *incredibly* frustrated at this point:  Had I not experienced
this for myself, I would not have believed it would have taken
anywhere near this long -- the installation & getting basic stuff
working took about 30 minutes, tops, the first time I ever did
*anything* with Cricket... on a FreeBSD 4.11 system.  For this exercise,
I needed to fetch the bits and pieces myself, which wasn't so terribly
bad, but then the generated Makefile for Time-HiRes-1.65 had all kinds
of bizarre syntax errors (odd number of "'" on a line; lines missing
chunks...).  And, of course, I am very unfamiliar with RPM, so that
didn't help much.  But this stuff with suEXEC is the most perverse
aspect yet.  Eh; enough ranting....]

Clues?  Help?

Thanks,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
There always has been more to "Open Source" than just GNU/Linux.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key.