CGI web space no longer working and Plusnet can't say why

[#1]

Help please!

At the beginning of April I noticed that all my web sites hosted on the CGI platform were no longer working - I have had these working for many years and I hadn't even made any changes so something must have happened on the CGI platform to break it.

I logged a call with Plusnet and 9 weeks later they finally gave up trying to fix it and said "..there is little else that we would be able to advise and to try posting the issue on our community forums".

Browsing to my websites just returns "Not Authorized to View This Page [CFN #0004]" - so seems like a permissions issue and I don't know why this is so hard to fix.

My setup that has worked for many years is as follows:

The Domain Hosting Settings are all set to "Other" and the Additional DNS records were set as per the following example

allsaintsbury.co.uk. A 91.136.8.9

www CNAME allsaintsbury.co.uk.

(as per Plusnet's CGI FAQs https://community.plus.net/t5/custom/page/page-id/_Hosting_Faq)

(have also tried other variations such as   www CNAME ccgi.plus.net   www CNAME ccgi.plus.net.  www CNAME ccgi.gornalls.plus.com    www CNAME ccgi.gornalls.plus.com.   none with any success)

The permissions on the Publlic directory are 0755 and the permissions on the htaccess file in the root of Public is 0644. Permissions on each of the directories holding website files is also 0755 and the rest of the files are 0644.

And the .htaccess file sitting in the Public directory is:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.allsaintsbury.co.uk$ [nc]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/allsaints/
RewriteRule (.*) /allsaints/$1 [L]

(I have taken the other sites off to keep it simple, but this is the one I would really like to get working again)

The webpages for allsaintsbury.co.uk are all sitting in a directory public/allsaints

NSLookup for allsaintsbury.co.uk correctly returns 91.136.8.9 and a WHOIS returns ns1.force9.net ns2.force9.net.

I can get to my website if I browse  http://ccgi.gornalls.plus.com/allsaints/   so it is indeed sat there, which makes me wonder if the htaccess redirection is no longer working.

It all seems to be set up correctly which is why I am at a complete loss, especially when it all fell over without me making any changes - help please!

[#2]

Welcome to the Plusnet Community forums.

As you said DNS appears to be set up OK, directing to the correct IP. Since username access and navigation on the site works fine my thoughts are that directory and file permissions are correctly set.

The .htacess redirect of the domain into a subdirectory should also work though it will redirect only the www form and the full stops should be preceded by backslashes to stop them matching any character.

If the content of the .htaccess file is not critical beyond the redirect you could quickly eliminate it as a problem source by renaming it to (say) X.htaccess using FTP then visiting

www.allsaintsbury.co.uk/allsaints/

Getting the same error would suggest the problem is not .htaccess related.

For reference the redirect should more correctly be coded as

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?allsaintsbury\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/allsaints/
RewriteRule (.*) /allsaints/$1 [L]

to redirect both the www and non-www domain addresses. My preference is to put flags, such as NC, in upper case, but lower case is also acceptable.

You mentioned "other sites" in your post - is access to these also failing?

[#3]

Thanks for your advice, much appreciated. My two other sites were failing in the same way.

I tried renaming .htaccess to x.htaccess and then visiting www.allsaintsbury.co.uk/allsaints/ gives a different error - Not Found [CFN #0005]

I edited the .htaccess file to be coded more correctly as per your suggestions and am still getting the same error - Not Authorized to View This Page [CFN #0004]

So it now reads:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?allsaintsbury\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/allsaints/
RewriteRule (.*) /allsaints/$1 [L]

(incidentally with .htaccess as per above, visiting www.allsaintsbury.co.uk/allsaints/ also gives - Not Found [CFN #0005] )

Don't know where this came from, or what effect it has, but I did notice that there is another .htaccess file that is in the very top level of my CGI structure (i.e. one level above the public dir).

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin(/.*|)$ CGI-BIN$1 [L,NC]

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

However I aslo tried renaming that and it made no difference.

Thanks again.

Phil

[#4]

Hi Phil.

I'm sorry to see you're having problems getting your CGI webspace working.

From reading the ticket on your account, I don't think I could offer more help than what our support team have already tried to do, so I'm tagging one of my colleagues on here @bobpullen who may be able to offer more guidance and/or insight into this for you.

[#5]

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@philgor wrote:

I tried renaming .htaccess to x.htaccess and then visiting www.allsaintsbury.co.uk/allsaints/ gives a different error - Not Found [CFN #0005]

This is a quirk of the file system. It reflects that there is no /allsaints/ folder in the place it is looking. The error without the folder name means there is no index file in the place it is looking and listing the folder contents is not permitted. The Not Found error suggests to me that the relevant www and bare domain aliasing settings on the server might need amending..I'm sure the colleague tagged by @Gandalf will check that.

Don't know where this came from, or what effect it has, but I did notice that there is another .htaccess file that is in the very top level of my CGI structure (i.e. one level above the public dir).

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin(/.*|)$ CGI-BIN$1 [L,NC]

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

This domain root .htaccess file will have been there since CCGI was migrated. It's a fudge to ensure any .cgi (shell) or .pl (Perl) scripts which were in /cgi-bin on the old server continued to work (from /public/CGI-BIN) after migration. If your /public/CGI-BIN folder is empty, initially I suggest renaming it to /public/MigCGI-BIN and rename that root /.htaccess to /Mig.htaccess. That will make them ineffective. If the file and folder haven't been missed after (say) a month, you could delete them.

[#6]

@philgor, try allsaintsbury.co.uk again. If it looks OK now, I'll repeat the steps I've just taken for the other two domains.

[#7]

The www and bare allsaintsbury.co.uk addresses now work as expected for me.

[#8]

That's good to see, thanks for letting us know. - Adam 

[#9]

Thanks guys, wwww.allsaintsbury.co.uk is back working again - well done, thank you so much!

I have changed the .htaccess to include my two other sites www.redroseplumbing.co.uk and www.gornalls.co.uk so it now reads as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?allsaintsbury\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/allsaints/
RewriteRule (.*) /allsaints/$1 [L]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?redroseplumbing\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/redrose/
RewriteRule (.*) /redrose/$1 [L]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?gornalls\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gornalls/
RewriteRule (.*) /gornalls/$1 [L]

www.redroseplumbing.co.uk and www.gornalls.co.uk are still not working so maybe still needs whatever steps were taken to fix www.allsaintsbury.co.uk ?

www.gornalls.co.uk gives "Not Authorized to View This Page [CFN #0004]"
(this site is out of date but should at least bring a page up!)

www.redroseplumbing.co.uk gives "Index of / Name Last modified Size Description"
(DNS settings for redroseplumbing.co.uk I changed this morning at about 9:30am to point back to the CGI space, so maybe that needs a bit more time to propgate?)

Both I can visit okay by http://ccgi.gornalls.plus.com/redrose/ and http://ccgi.gornalls.plus.com/gornalls/

Many thanks again!

Phil

[#10]

Glad to hear your CGI webspace is working again Phil.

Apologies for the length of time this took and the experience you had.

Let us know if you need any further help.

[#11]

It does look like the settings changes made to fix allsaintsbury still need to be done for the other domains. @bobpullen did say he would wait for confirmation that the former now worked for you.

The revised /public/.htaccess you posted looks OK to me, though only one RewriteEngine on directive is needed (before the first rewrite).

If you wanted to rewrite the ccgi versions of the addresses to subfolders you could do this by changing The %{HTTP_HOST} lines to be like

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^((www|ccgi)\.)?allsaintsbury\.co\.uk$ [NC]

I suspect the DNS entry for ccgi.redroseplumbing.co.uk might have disappeared when making the DNS changes you mentioned this morning. If this is the case I suggest leaving things overnight to let propagation work through. Having more than one DNS change on the go sometimes confuses updating.

[#12]

I'll try and revisit tomorrow. FYI, I removed the ccgi.allsaintsbury alias from the web server because it didn't look to be in use.

[#13]

@philgor, should all be sorted now. Fancy giving things a quick check to make sure I haven't missed anything?

For the record, the issue was with the way the domains were configured at our hosting partner's side. For some reason you had separate CGI webspace configured for each of your domains, rather than the space being shared amongst them i.e. when you were browsing to allsaintsbury.co.uk it wasn't serving the same webspace as ccgi.gornalls.plus.com.

I fixed it by exporting/deleting the domain aliases from your CGI account, and then adding them again.

[#14]

Fantastic, all my sites are back up again! Thank you so much for figuring out what the problem was, much appreciated.

Just one thing that puzzles me, I initially logged the call via the member centre and not a lot happened for many weeks - but as soon as I posted on the forum, you guys did a brilliant and quick job - this is obviously the way to go once you know, but why is there a difference?

Thanks again, I worked in the IT industry for 28 years and I know the folk behind the scenes doing the nitty gritty work don't always get the praise they deserve, so cheers, well done!

[#15]

---

@philgor wrote:

Just one thing that puzzles me, I initially logged the call via the member centre and not a lot happened for many weeks - but as soon as I posted on the forum, you guys did a brilliant and quick job - this is obviously the way to go once you know, but why is there a difference?

Aside from being able to access your site via FTP etc. our front-line staff don't typically support web-authoring problems - which they may have mistaken this as. Thinking the issue was within Plusnet's domain, your ticket was also with our Ops team for some time - and they won't have been able to help because everything 'our' side was configured correctly. Apologies it took so long but it's a bit of an unusual one. It's certainly the first time I've encountered the problem since the platform was migrated years ago!

I'll be honest, for the more complex CGI issues, you're probably going to better posting here as the knowledge is broader.