Question

I have just installed the r21 - 08 Jul 2005 - 18:12 beta version of TWiki. It all went quite smoothly really and after tidying up various path name errors it all seems to work pretty well except for GIFs not displaying.

The view script appears to be trying to execute the GIF files, originally I was getting errors as a result of them not being executables. Then I fixed the permissions so they couldn't execute and now I get errors like the following from apache:-

[Thu Nov 24 15:45:36 2005] [error] [client 193.128.168.194] (13)Permission denied: exec of '/var/www/cgi-bin/twiki/pub/TWiki/PatternSkin/tips_bg.gif' failed, referer: http://84-51-144-229.isbdlt032.adsl.metronet.co.uk/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome [Thu Nov 24 15:45:36 2005] [error] [client 193.128.168.194] Premature end of script headers: tips_bg.gif, referer: http://84-51-144-229.isbdlt032.adsl.metronet.co.uk/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

This sounds like some sort of permissions/access configuration problem but I can't find what at the moment.

I can't run testenv at the moment because attempts to download it time out.

Environment

-- ChrisGreen - 24 Nov 2005

Answer

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This looks like a server configuration error. I guess you have a ScriptAlias directive mapping /cgi-bin/ to /var/www/cgi-bin/, so all files in that tree, including TWiki's pub directory, are considered executables. They aren't, of course, and they don't have execute permissions set, hence "Permission denied".

I'd suggest to move the whole TWiki tree out of /var/www/cgi-bin/ to another directory and add a ScriptAlias directive for TWiki's bin directory (and only for the bin directory).

-- HaraldJoerg - 24 Nov 2005

That was it! Brilliant. A quick move of the twiki directory up one level to /var/www/twiki and corresponding changes to the config files has got everything working correctly.

Thanks very much for the quick (and exactly correct) diagnosis.

-- ChrisGreen - 25 Nov 2005