Re: Having problems with external servers

Mark Brown (mbrown@openmarket.com)
Tue, 17 Sep 1996 10:27:50 -0400 

Message-Id: <199609171427.KAA16012@breckenridge.openmarket.com>
To: fastcgi-developers@openmarket.com
Subject: Re: Having problems with external servers 
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.94.960916184759.14421A-100000@harlie> 
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 10:27:50 -0400
From: Mark Brown <mbrown@openmarket.com>


Eric J. Schwertfeger reports:

    I'm trying to use an external server, launched with

        ./cgi-fcgi -start -connect :9979 /usr/jay/bin/tiny.fcgi

    This runs, gives no errors, but nothing can connect to it.  If I
    do a ps on the machine (a SunServer 20, uname -a reports "SunOS
    arch9 5.4 generic sun4m sparc") the process doesn't show up, and a
    netstat -an shows nothing bound to port 9979.  Has anyone seen
    this?  If it makes any difference, we don't have a compiler on
    this machine, so I had to compile fast-cgi on a similar machine,
    but running 5.3

It is hard to connect to a process that isn't there :-)

I haven't seen this problem before.  Do you have a debugger on your
5.4 machine?  If so you can run cgi-fcgi from the debugger and find
out why it is exiting.  If not you are reduced to adding print
statements to cgi-fcgi.c to find out why it is exiting.

Compiling on 5.3 and running on 5.4 might well cause problems, I don't
know for sure.  None of this stuff was tested on 5.3 or compiled on
5.3 and tested on 5.4.

    Also, is there an ExternalAppClass command for the Apache fast-cgi
    module, or a different syntax for the AppClass directive, to
    directly connect to this once I get it running, or do I run
    cgi-fcgi as an fcgi script and let it make the connection, or do I
    run cgi-fcgi as regular cgi?  I suspect the middle option is
    correct, since that seems to make sense.

There is no ExternalAppClass command in mod_fastcgi.  I would
welcome a nice clean patch ...

cgi-fcgi is not designed to run as a fastcgi application, only
as cgi.  (Another SMOP to fix that.)  So the only available option
for external apps on Apache (and NCSA) right now is running cgi-fcgi
as regular cgi.

    --mark