wwwtest is a Sun UltraSPARC II+ running Solaris 5.10. If you are a student of the CSE or ECE departments and you have a login account on the department's networks, you can use this machine to run CGI scripts. You have a common home directory on all of the department's Suns, and you can develop your code on any of those machines.
You can run your CGI by either of two (mutually exclusive) methods:
As 'nobody':
This is the classic method of running CGI scripts. You can
place a CGI program or script with a name ending in ".cgi" anywhere in
your ~/WWW-data directory, and the web server will run
that script using the 'nobody' account.
The usual local practice of using ~/WWW-data as the root of your
local web space applies to CGI scripts. For example, if your
logon ID is 'bozo', and you put a CGI script at
~/WWW-data/the/clown.cgi, you could run the CGI script by
pointing a browser to:
http://wwwtest.cse.lehigh.edu/~bozo/the/clown.cgi
The classic style of CGI is best-suited for CGI that simply generates web pages. However, under classic CGU the only way available to write data gathered from a web page to persistent storage (e.g. disk) is to make the data file world-readable and world-writeable. Creating and using world-writeable files is a poor practice, of course. If your CGI needs to write data, please use:
CGI-Wrap:
The wwwtest server has been configured to allow the use of CGI-Wrap
on your .cgi scripts. In oirder to use CGI-Wrap, you would place your
.cgi scripts in your ~/WWW-data/cgi-bin directory, and (presuming that
your login ID is "bozo") your script will be accessible via:
wwwtest.cse.lehigh.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bozo/the.clown.cgi
CGI-Wrap runs your script as your user ID, therefore giving it the
permissions that you normally have. Any files created will be
owned by you using the permissions you set in your script (or your
default permissions). CGI-Wrap scripts can only be run from
within LU networks (including connections across the VPN), and are
not available from the world at large.
Logs:
If you're like most people who are developing CGI code, you will find that tracking the web server access and error logs is essential to determining how (and whether) your code is functioning as intended. You have two options for viewing the web server's logs: From LU networks (but not from other places) you can view a web page showing the CGI access and error logs for your work. Use the link in the left sidebar to go there. The log display is updated every few seconds to show any new entries. Or you can log on to wwwtest, and examine the logs directly; this might be particularly useful if your code has serious errors.
