php(5)-cgi + Apache2 + fastcgiexternalserver = lost hair

[Tony Shadwick <tshadwick+php.net@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okie.  I've been googling for days on this now, and I've come across 
several PHP bug reports that basically say this is a configuration 
error, and not a php bug.  If that's true, I seriously need help.

On my web server box, I'm running Apache2.1, and in my httpd.conf file I 
have this:

FastCGIExternalServer  /path/to/stub/fcgi-bin/php -host php-host:9000

Then in my Includes/site.conf (individual sites each have their own 
config file), I have this:

AddHandler php-cgi .php
Action php-cgi /fcgi-bin/php
ScriptAlias /fcgi-bin/php ScriptAlias /fcgi-bin/php 
/path/to/stub/fcgi-bin/php

Then I have a directive that adds +ExecCGI to the user's directory.  So 
far so good.  Restart apache.

On the php-host box, I've compiled:

php5-5.2.3          PHP Scripting Language (Apache Module and CLI)

I start it using php-cgi -b 9000.  The port accepts connections just 
fine.  When I go to browse to a simple script on my web host that has:

<?

phpinfo();

?>

I get "No input file specified." on screen, and in the logs I get what 
oddly appears to be a 404 message:

172.16.12.2 - - [23/Jul/2007:22:27:12 -0500] "GET /phpinfo.php HTTP/1.1" 
404 25 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) 
AppleWebKit/419.2.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"

Except it's really not a 404.  If I get rid of the php handler, it 
returns the text of the script just fine.

I've googled this mess forwards and backwards, and what I come across is 
that there appears to be some sort of a tiff between PHP and web 
servers, where web servers usually pass along the environment variable 
SCRIPT_NAME, whereas PHP wants SCRIPT_FILENAME in order to determine 
that it is running in cgi mode (I think?).  I've done everything I can 
think of to facilitate that.  I've adjusted the relavent setting in 
php.ini on the php host

cgi.fix_pathinfo=1

Restart the php-cgi binary, does no good.  I've tried making mod-rewrite 
changes on apache2 to force SCRIPT_FILENAME to be assigned, that doesn't 
work.  I've tried manually assigning a SCRIPT_FILENAME environment 
variable on the shell that I'm executing php-cgi from.  That too fails.

Out of desperation, I finally ran tcpdump -w ~/phpdump.txt -i em0 port 
9000 on the php-cgi host.  I won't bore you with everything that 
wireshark says about it, rather, the most relevant part gets revealed by 
strings I think:

# strings ~/phpdump.txt
REDI
SCRIPT_NAME/fcgi-bin/
Status: 404
X-Powered


A few things stand out to me here:  number one, SCRIPT_NAME appears to 
be getting sent, 2 it looks like php-cgi is the one returning 404, not 
the web server, and finally....this is getting a bit truncated, isn't 
it?  I'd fully expect to find the full X-Powered header there, and if 
it's going to say /fcgi-bin/, I'd expect to find /fcgi-bin/php.  and 
REDI....?

Anyone have an idea what I can do to fix this up?  The file DOES exist. 
 It'd currently chmod 777 to make sure it's not a permissions thing 
(it's just phpinfo at this point anyway....).  The traffic *is* being 
sent to port 9000 on the php-cgi host.  What else can I do?

Tony Shadwick
OSS Solutions