CGI Information for Personal Web Pages

Netdoor now allows all users to run CGI programs from their personal webpages. Running your own CGI is a feature that we believe will enhance our personal webpages greatly.

Note: These rules apply only for CGI within personal webpages. All questions concerning CGI within business pages should be directed to admin@netdoor.com

Notice: Netdoor's techincal support department and administrative staff do not provide technical support either via phone or e-mail for the construction and/or debugging of personal CGI. The personal web customer must already have a working knowledge of UNIX methods and commands. However, the admin team can help with cgi programming and debugging for a fee of $65.00/per hour.

Please ensure that your CGI complies with each step listed below. If you don't, then any request for support concerning your CGI for personal webpages will point you back to this list of criteria. This list has been compiled based on user input and administrative testing and is pretty thorough. It has been our experience that most all questions concerning CGI for personal accounts are handled on this list. If a condition exists that keeps your CGI from functioning is not on this list, then it will be added once it's diagnosed.

If you're looking for ready-made CGI, you might want to check out Matt's Script Archive or The CGI Resources Homepage. Both of these sites contain many excellent scripts that should run with a minimum of effort.

If some of you budding programmers like writing your own CGI, we recommend you write them in Perl. Your scripts should be Perl 5 compliant. You can also write your CGI in PHP.

There is basic criteria for your scripts to run properly.

1. The CGI script must end in the extension .cgi All lower case because unix is case sensitive.
   Example: my-script.cgi will work. my-script.CGI will not.
2. The CGI script must be in a directory on www2.
3. The CGI script must to be world readable/executable. If in doubt, use your ftp client to issue the command site chmod 755 *.cgi in your CGI directory.
4. The file must be owned by you and be in the group users.
5. The CGI cannot call any script outside of your directory hierarchy.
6. Your home directory, and/or cgi-bin directory cannot be writable by anyone else. By default, no one's account is, so this should not be a problem. Any directory that you run cgi out of must be only writable by you the user. If in doubt, site chmod 755 the directory.
7. When writing your own CGI, the path to the Perl interpreter that should be used is

   /usr/local/bin/perl

8. If you use Notepad/Wordpad or any other Windows based editor to edit your CGI, make sure that when you send the file to www2 via ftp, it is sent as ASCII and not Binary.
9. To debug your program, assuming you wrote it in Perl, you can check for cgi errors by logging into Member Services and clicking on View errors generated by your personal web.