Migrating from IIS to Apache

At my job we use a combination of IIS, SQL Server, and Perl. In general it works pretty well. But there is one major problem: if we ever do a warn in perl, instead of printing the message to the log, it crashes the server. That’s a big deal since multiple people are using the server and fixing the issue means VNCing in and recycling the app pool. This doesn’t always happen, but it happens a lot; enough to make me consider setting up Apache on my personal computer so that I can get some serious logging. Anyway, I don’t know if we have a typical setup or not, but this is what I had to do to get it all going.

ServerRoot "C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2"
Listen 80
LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so
LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so
LoadModule asis_module modules/mod_asis.so
LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so
LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so
LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so
LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so
LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so
LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so
LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so
LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so
LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so
LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so
LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so
LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so
LoadModule isapi_module modules/mod_isapi.so
LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so
LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so
<ifmodule !mpm_netware_module>
<ifmodule !mpm_winnt_module>
User daemon
Group daemon
</ifmodule>
</ifmodule>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot "C:/Inetpub/static"
<directory>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</directory>
<directory "c:/inetpub/static">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    DirectoryIndex Default.html
</directory>
<directory "c:/inetpub/main">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    DirectoryIndex main.plx
</directory>
<ifmodule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.html
</ifmodule>
<filesmatch "^.ht">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</filesmatch>
ErrorLog "logs/error.log"
LogLevel warn
<ifmodule log_config_module>
    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %&gt;s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i"" combined
    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %&gt;s %b" common
    <ifmodule logio_module>
      LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %&gt;s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i" %I %O" combinedio
    </ifmodule>
    CustomLog "logs/access.log" common
</ifmodule>
<ifmodule alias_module>
    Alias /user /Inetpub/main
    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/cgi-bin/"
</ifmodule>
<directory "c:/program files/apache foundation/apache2.2/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride None
    Options None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</directory>
DefaultType text/plain
<ifmodule mime_module>
    TypesConfig conf/mime.types
    AddType application/x-compress .Z
    AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .plx .plex
</ifmodule>

[Tue Dec 09 20:59:04 2008] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified.  : couldn't create child process: 720003: employee_training_report.plx
[Tue Dec 09 20:59:04 2008] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified.  : couldn't spawn child process: C:/Inetpub/epms/customer/employee_training_report.plx

As stated, this just means that the bangline is wrong and needs to be set to #!/usr/bin/perl. Note: the log is probably in C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/logs/error.log, but again, you can find that in the start menu.

print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
print header;

header is a function of the CGI module. For IIS you print out the first part to force the server into NPH mode. I recommend, for ease of migration, making your own module that your scripts can use that will print the header correctly whether it’s Apache or IIS. Here’s ours:

sub header {
    return (($ENV{PERLXS})?"HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n":"").CGI->header(@_);<br />
}

And note that anything that gets passed to the header method automatically takes any arguments that you passed and gives them to CGI. This allows for a simple method of regular expression based search and replace to fix things to use your new method. (for vim something like this will work: :%s/v^(s*prints+).*header((.*));/1Module::header2;/g ) I do this part as I see it as a problem, as my boss didn’t want me to search and replace the whole codebase, so the error you are going to look for is a 500 from the browser and then something like this in the log:

[Tue Nov 18 17:38:38 2008] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] malformed header from script. Bad header=HTTP/1.0 200 OK: foo.plx

And that’s basically it! Any tips you might have to add are welcome!

Posted Wed, Dec 17, 2008

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