[techtalk] Apache/CGI and directory indices.

[Mary Gardiner]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to set up a Mailman website at present at mailman.puzzling.org
This is a virtual domain on 203.24.211.109

Here's the relevant sections of the httpd.conf:

<VirtualHost 203.24.211.109>
    ServerAdmin mary at creative.net.au
    ServerName mailman.puzzling.org
    Alias /pipermail/ "/home/mailman/archives/public/"
    Alias /images/ "/usr/src/mailman-2.0/misc/"
    ScriptAlias / "/home/mailman/cgi-bin/"
    <Directory "/">
            DirectoryIndex index.html
    </Directory>
    <Directory "/pipermail/">
           Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride None
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog logs/mail-puzzling-error_log
    CustomLog logs/mail-puzzling-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

This means that http://mailman.puzzling.org/listinfo and
so on display correctly. However, I would like http://mailman.puzzling.org/
to display something other than "403 Forbidden" (error log gives
"attempt to invoke directory as script: /home/mailman/cgi-bin")

That's the purpose of the
    <Directory "/">
            DirectoryIndex index.html
    </Directory>
section of the VirtualHost config. But it doesn't work.

I tried setting it up as
    DocumentRoot "/home/mailman/cgi-bin"
    AddHandler cgi-script *
    <Directory "/">
	Options +ExecCGI

and so on, but this dies very badly with a rather garbled warning
about Mailman expecting a different gid, although it does find the
index.html

So how can I keep the ScriptAlias line and still convince apache
to read index.html (which is just a symlink to listinfo btw)?

Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>
GPG Key ID: 77625870