(13)Permission denied: access to /cgi-bin/test.cgi denied

Question

I am trying out CGI-scripts for the first time but without success. I have read many tutorials and followed may threads in different forums but I can not make it work. I am using a appache web server on a Fedora 10 machine. I always have problem with

[Wed Oct 21 20:47:36 2009] [notice] SELinux policy enabled; httpd running as context unconfined_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0
[Wed Oct 21 20:47:36 2009] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Wed Oct 21 20:47:36 2009] [notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...
[Wed Oct 21 20:47:36 2009] [notice] Digest: done
[Wed Oct 21 20:47:36 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.2.9 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8g configured -- resuming normal operations

I need help. This is what my environment looks like.

uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 #1 SMP Tue Nov 18 12:19:59 EST 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

ls -l /var/www/cgi-bin/
total 36
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   106 2009-10-21 18:29 index.html
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11089 2009-02-24 20:11 squidGuard.cgi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  5720 2009-02-24 20:11 squidGuard-simple.cgi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  5945 2009-02-24 20:11 squidGuard-simple-de.cgi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   110 2009-10-21 17:38 test.cgi

apachectl -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix)
Server built:   Mar  6 2009 09:12:25

perl -version
This is perl, v5.10.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
Copyright 1987-2007, Larry Wall

My script

cat test.cgi
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print "Hello, world!\n";

The error message I gen when I try to access the web page server "http://192.168.50.29/cgi-bin/test.cgi" looks like this:

[Wed Oct 21 21:00:27 2009] [error] [client 192.168.50.69] (13)Permission denied: access to /cgi-bin/test.cgi denied

I have added the line:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"

to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

I just can not make it work. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Check your os permissions for test.cgi and be sure the user or group you are using to run your apache it has read access.

EDIT - The problem is with permissions, but not with read permissions, as you are using SELinux, you need to worry about your file context. Check this thread at fedora forums, it explains quite a few options to solve your problem.