Oh noes, Infopop comes back from the dead!

As part of an effort to restore old community archives, I have taken on the project of reviving an old forum archive, an Infopop UBB 5.47 board, for the sake of preserving our ancient content in the form best suited for it. While I can import this to another board, I feel it would be best served by preserving the UBB as best I can.

So far, it's in place and things appear as if they should be working, but something still isn't quite right. The Ultimate.cgi file, the base for all functions of the board itself, will not load over the web. In its place, an Error 500: Internal Server Error, etc. But at the same time, the site functions with no trouble whatsoever when Ultimate.cgi is run from within the shell. This would seem to indicate that the problem is not within the script itself, but perhaps a component of Apache. At the same time, apache is tossing an error along the lines of "Premature end of script headers." I'm stumped, but I really don't have enough experience to make more sense of this. Other CGI scripts function without incident, including the board's own control panel.

At this point in time, the software in question is just over seven years old. It is, by any possible measure, ancient. I'm not expecting it to work, but if I can get it going then I'll be proud.

Thoughts?

That sounds to me very much like a *nix line-endings problem. Particularly considering the way the files were resurrected, it is likely that one or more files were moved to the server with WIN/DOS or older "MAC" style line endings.

You could dos2unix them in the shell, or use a tool on your own system, or simply open them and then save them in a *nix editor in the shell to eliminate this potential problem. Additionally, some ftp program can do this "automagically" by using the "ascii" mode if properly configured, but my experience has been that this is sometimes not completely relieable depending upon the client/file.

--rlparker

As of now, no luck. The scripts have all been run through with dos2unix and so far, no luck. The error persists. I can still view it from within the shell (./Ultimate.cgi) and get full working source, but I can't access the dynamic content through apache. The error is still the same. Could it be other content from another location that I am somehow missing? (Damn these vague error messages!)

That's discouraging! One other thing that comes to mind is that often those "Premature End of Script Headers" from apache is the result of a permission problem.

I've run into this with perl scripts before when I neglected to set the permissions on *all* the executables to 755 (files *and* the directories they are in). Have you double-checked all your permissions? Because of DreamHost's suexec implementation, they cannot be set "looser" than 755; you should *start* by setting all executables to 755 and other files to 644, then adjust as needed or desired *after* the thing runs in a browser.

Also, since you have dos2unix'd them, I am assuming that none of the files were uploaded in binary mode.

You should also check to make sure *all* the various component files made the "trip" to the new server.

Those are the only other things that come to mind at the moment. UBB was a pretty well-running program back in it's day, so I'm thinking the permissions issue on DreamHost, or something else "simple" (once you find it!) is probably the culprit.

--rlparker