Re: ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ (Apache Users)

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 6:44 PM, John Fisher GM <john.fisher125@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I looked at cgi-bin. There are two files, php and php5, each 8 MB in size. That seems a bit odd. But in this small site, we're not using php, so we're OK.

Based on the size it is reasonable to conclude those are executables of the PHP language. If you run "which php" at a shell prompt it will probably tell you the main PHP executable is someplace like /usr/bin/php. The only thing odd is that someone put a copy of those executables in that directory. Especially since you imply your site only uses the Perl language.

I realized the script we are running is not invoked by apache. It's run by chron and that invokes the .pl file (it's a log file aggregator). So although I removed the ScriptAlias, the script still runs.

A program run by the cron(1) scheduler (try typing "man cron" at a shell prompt) will only depend on the ScriptAlias directive you removed if the program makes HTTP requests to your web server. And even then only if it requests URIs in that cgi-bin directory. Otherwise, as your found out, the script will continue to run despite changing the Apache web server configuration.

I have a few more questions, but they are more complex, so I'll wait till later to pose them. Thanks for your help so far.

Please don't take this the wrong way but you are clearly in over your head. Your company needs to hire a consultant to help you with these issues. It's only because your questions up to this point have had fairly obvious answers and didn't require actual knowledge of your web server environment that we could help.

Kurtis Rader

Caretaker of the exceptional canines Junior and Hank