Configuring for the CERN Server

THE META-HTML LANGUAGE REFERENCE MANUAL

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Configuring for the CERN Server

In your server configuration file:

Map	/*		/cgi-bin/nph-engine/*
Exec	/cgi-bin/*	/cgi-bin/*

CERN/3.0A Bug
The Meta-HTML Engine tries hard to figure out where your document root is. It starts out by looking in argv[0] to see which directory the program is running from. By convention, programs which call fork() and exec() place the complete path to the program to execute in argv[0].

But, does CERN do this? No. In fact, there are no variables in the environment, nor in argv[], from which this information can be gleaned!

So, the Meta-HTML Engine cannot find a local configuration file, and cannot determine the location of the document root directory from the information supplied by the CERN server.

Meta-HTML Workaround
There is a workaround for this bug in the CERN server. If the Meta-HTML Engine cannot find a configuration file in the normal way, then it looks in the contents of the environment variable METAHTML_ENGINE_CONFIG_FILE, and tries to treat that value as the location for the configuration file. If that fails, then finally the file "/www/bin/engine.conf" is looked for, and configuration is attempted from that file.

Try copying the engine.conf file in your /cgi-bin directory to /www/bin/engine.conf, or start your server with the environment variable METAHTML_ENGINE_CONFIG_FILE set to the location of the engine.conf file that came with your distribution.