[CLUE-Tech] help with GNU mailman - displaying jibberish

[Jim Ockers]

Hi Dan,

Dan Harris wrote:
> 
> 
> I've been running GNU's mailman on a Debian (woody) server for a year or 
> so.  I'm happy to say I haven't needed to touch the admin interface once 
> since I originally set it up.  However, the need has come about for me 
> to do it and I'm running into some very strange problems.  It looks like 
> when apache ( 1.3.26 + mod_perl ) tries to exec one of the cgi programs, 
> it shows whats at the following URL ( it's a bunch of garbage ascii ):
> 
> http://coronasolutions.com/cgi-bin/mailman/admin
> 
> However, when I run them from command-line ( su'd ), they appear to spit 
> out the correct HTML to stdout. 

I think your web server is not handling the cgi-bin directory as a 
scriptalias.  Or, for some reason it's just not running the CGIs.

> The 'admin' executable looks like this:
> 
> -rwxr-sr-x    1 root     list         5584 Sep 18  2002 admin
> 
> and 'ldd' output looks like this:
> 
> libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40019000)
>         /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
> 
> I wonder if something happened during a software update that broke it?  
> Is this a suid problem?  I'm confused..

I don't think the problem is any of the above.

I think your web server's httpd.conf needs to be corrected so that the 
cgi-bin stuff is all properly executed by the system.  Without looking
at the httpd.conf I can only speculate of course.

If you want more help please do this:

grep -v ^# /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | sed 's/#.*//' | grep '[a-zA-Z]' 

and send the output to the list or me.

Hope this helps,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/