Hi all,

Got a question regarding using php scripts as cgi's.

What I am trying to do is this. (ya may need a bit of background, it gets a
little complicated... well for me its complicated)

Im building a web based email system using php (duh) as the front end and
glue for everything, part of it is using a program called getmail to
retreive remote pop accounts to the virtual accounts on the server (its all
virtual using qmail/vpopmail and courier-imap). The various setttings for
this are in a file called getmailrc, in the virtual users home dir, (this
will also be theoretically relevant when I try and do the same thing with a
server side filtering program called maildrop.. but one at a time I reckon
:))

ie. /home/vpopmail/domains/some.email.domain/someuser/.getmail/getmailrc

This file is owned specifically by a user/group otherwise getmail wont work

ie: -rw-r--r--    1 vpopmail vchkpw        585 Sep 29 07:16 getmailrc

any permissions other than this will tweak getmails internal security and
stop it.

I decided to minimise security problems and use mysql as an intermidiary
storage for any rules created for getmail, which works fine. :) (yay me..
lol)

NOW comes the problem, I need to write (overwrite) that getmailrc file after
the user has finished messing with their settings, to do this I decided that
since the file can only be read/written to by the vpopmail/vchkpw
user/group, that I would knock up a php script to run as a cgi, that would
do only one thing: Upon a button being pressed to 'finish edit' the new
rules would be written to the mysql table, then the cgi would be invoked
with a particular identifier so that it could then look up the mysql table
(using that identifier so it gets the right rows), and following some rules
inbuilt, write out the getmailrc file with that restrictive permissions set.

I wrote up a script that was just for POC, that would get the data for where
that file was supposed to be (the /home/vpopmail/etc...etc) and read it,
then break out the various details and display it, basically just showing me
what was already in the file. (using the shebang method, as my php cgi
interpreter is OUTSIDE the web tree, but thats another story of getting the
damn thing to work at all... damn RPM'S sometimes...
that --enable-force-redirect had me stuck for a few days)

When I tested it out from the shell, using ./getmailtest.cgi as root, it
worked, in that it did what it was sposed to.. display the contents of the
getmailrc file. This cgi php script is owned by vpopmail/vchkpw which should
allow reading the file as said above

Great, thought I, and proceeded to attempt linking to it from within the
editing script, using both an attempt with a 'submit' button and a click
through link.

Now comes the prob, it fails, with an error of being unable to either open
the file, or that the file doesnt exist (depending on what I fiddle with in
the script).

Would anyone have any ideas as to what may be going wrong here? I havent
tried doing this before, using php as a cgi to do stuff to files on the
system, so I am at quite a loss, and any help would be appreciated.

Regards

David Cook








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