Question

• TWiki version:Twikibeta
• Perl version:
• Web server & version:
• Server OS:
• Web browser & version:
• Client OS:

we are trying to get Twiki up and running on our university web server. We are having trouble with getting past the stage where the TWikiGuest is doing the work. (Sorry I am not the tech guy. We register but when we go to edit we are never asked for a password or any form of authentication. As such all editing is done by the guest. My mate thinks that it has something to do with the ht access. We have gone through the instructions but he thinks that it is related to this. Here I will paste his email to our server administrator(garnet and mailer refer to two Florida state Uni servers):

"Thank you for all of youre help and support, however we are still encountering some difficulties with the .htaccess file. Before moving everything to the garnet server we decided to test a "working" configuration under mailer, but the .htaccess file in the cgi-bin directy just gets ignored. We've tried the .htaccess from a non cgi-bin directory and this worked perfectly. However it does not work from the cgi-bin. Could this probably have something to do with the fact that we have to use the cgiwrap? A chmod 000 to .htaccess should not allow any access to the directory, but it does. We've also tried several different permissions values, unfortunately they all failed.

Can anyone help us solve the problem. You can look at the page if you want at:

http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/vabrown/view/Main/WebHome

You will see eher that anyone can edit without registering. Even when you register you are never asked for your password etc

Thanks Martin

i strongly believe that it has something to do with .htaccess and the cgiwrap settins. is anyone out there using TWiki while trapped behind a cgiwrap?

Vic

-- MartinHardie - 16 Jan 2003

Answer

I don't think this has to do with cgiwrap settings. Many apache hosts are set up via the main httpd.conf file to not use the .htaccess file within the cgi_bin directory (and, by association, within cgiwrap directory, too). If you don't have root access to the server, there is no way to change this.

However, since you mentioned .htaccess is working in other directories, you can try putting the TWiki perl scripts somewhere else other than the cgi_bin directory. More than likely, another directory is not set up to run perl scripts by default. However, unless the sysadmin went through the trouble of changing the apache defaults for directories where .htaccess is enabled, you can explicitly enable perl scripts in any directory via .htaccess directives.

The following directives should do the trick. You can wrap the following directives in "Files" or "FilesMatch" block directives for further control:

Options +ExecCGI
SetHandler cgi-script

If they don't work, you're going to need root access to change the main apache configuration. If you do have root access, however, I recommend you turn off all .htaccess processing and put all apache config directives in the main configuration file.

-- TomKagan - 15 Apr 2003