Overview

I am having an incredible amount of difficulties getting cgi scripts to run. I am running Apache 2.0.54 on Fedora Core 4. I have already disabled SElinux. I am getting an "internal server error" error. I have succeeded in installing and configuring PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, MediaWiki and phpBB2 (notice that they all use PHP and not CGI?) For the life of my I have been unable to get any perl scripts to work.


Background

I have created a user intranet who's home directory is: /home/intranet/. I have created a sub directory called www and uploaded a cgi file named test.cgi

The contents of the /home/intranet/www/test.cgi are as follows:
I have run chmod 755 test.cgi from the command line.

I have configured Apache as follows:
Some of the above code is superfluous, however it should not conflict.

When I access the file over the web I get a standard "500 Internal Server Error" message.

The /var/httpd/error_log file shows the following:
The /var/httpd/suexec.log show this:
(I'm not really sure what this log file is/says)


Other stuff

Here is the contents of my /home/intranet/www/ directory:
You will see that I actually chmod 777 the test.cgi files. The files were originally owned by root because I created them at the command line while logged in as root. To change the user and group I ran the following while in /home/intranet/:
(I received an Internal Server Error message regardless of the file ownership)


My Thoughts

Even after significant research and "tweaking" I have been unsuccessful at getting this to work. I have seen many other people have issues running CGI using Fedora. Most of it seems to revolve around SElinux, which I disabled (by editing /etc/selinux/config and setting "SELINUX=disabled" then rebooting)

I can serve up static .html pages without incident. I think I have everything configured correctly but obviously I do not. I've been looking at this for so long that I cannot see the forest through the trees so any help would be appreciated.

I think that your problem is suexec (I have never used it so I don't know how exactly it works)
Test your config with:Try to edit <VirtualHost> to see if it works:

The first time I tried to use cgi scripts in apache outside of /var/www/cgi-bin, I thought I was going to pull my hair out before getting it to work, so hang in there.

There are a few differences between your httpd.conf and mine, which may or may not have anything to do with your problems.

1) Try naming the directory explicitly in the “Options ExecCGI” directory section:

<Directory “/home/intranet/www”>
Options ExecCGI
AllowOverride None
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
</Directory>

2) “AddHandler cgi-script .cgi” only appears in my virtual host definition, not in the “Options ExecCGI” directory section. I doubt that is the problem.

3) “SuexecUserGroup” wasn’t used in my virtual host definitions. By following the script execution in top, you can see that the user “apache” is executing the script, which agrees with everything I have read about apache. So the implicit definition of the user and group must be “apache” (i.e., SuexecUserGroup apache apache),

4) In my implementation of “Options ExecCGI”, it is defined outside of the virtual host definition, just like how the standard /var/www/cgi-bin “Options ExecCGI” is defined, probably at the end of your httpd.conf.

5) My scripts will run with root as owner/group or with a non-root owner/group. The *.cgi files have permission 755.

Again, none of these differences may be relevant to your problem.

What I ended up doing was removing the suexec from the configuration. So now all scripts are run as apache:apache. I still need to figure out how to get scripts to run as the individuel user for security reasons but for now this will do.

Thank you all for your help.