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Perl is a steaming pile of green alien shit. |
| Posted by Administrator (admin) on May 20 2010 at 6:06 PM |
It is. I have to get perl working on one of our web servers for work and I swear I am going to shoot a puppy in the face. I have been dicking around with this for a solid 8 hours now. We have a production web server and it does not have perl installed. We have one legacy client we are still hosting with another provider and they need perl because their shopping cart was script was carved on the wall on a goddamn cave.
We use CENTOS and that is a great OS for this stuff and I use yum to install packages. Well, I have mod_perl installed and it appears to be running. When I try to run a .pl script, I get source code. Seriously, I install the apache perl module and I have to tell apache that I want it to process .pl files? So, I set the handler correctly so it will process the .pl file and now I get a 500 internal server error even on a hello world script.
After hours of googleing and tweaking the script, the httpd server, and permissions I am no closer than when I started. By the way, all of the forums posts about this issue remain completely unanswered.
I have tried everything I could possibly think of to no avail. In the apache logs I get something about not having permission to access the file. I tried running it from the cgi-bin but the perl cgi-bin is not accessible to the web. And hey, why do I need to use a cgi-bin in the first place? Because perl was not made for the web and it is apparently so "uber-fucking-powerful" it couldn't possibly be allowed to run in the same space and your public web files. It apparently would cause a crack in the fabric of space-time that would cause our heads to explode and our pets to start puking rainbows or something.
In a desperate attempt to get this working I fired up a new virtual server and installed XAMPP. I figured, “Hell, they already did all the work, this should be easy!” The install was very easy until I went the to IP of my new server and I got a message telling me that I can’t use the site from the outside. How that anus am I supposed to visit the site locally? I’ll just pull that up with my text browser on my server and config it for the 2 weeks. I was told I could just edit the config file. Would be nice if they told be where the file was located. That is your standard Linux logic. Make everything configurable with 36 text files located in 35 different directories with minimal documentation. As if the creators of these programs said with a smile, “Good luck figuring this out, Asshole.”
So here I am with not a shred of progress because of my own ineptitude combined with shit that does not do what I tell it to do (also my own ineptitude).