The nms Project

Web programs written by experts

[General nms Questions] [Perl Questions] [Common Problems]

How do I report a problem?
There is a conflict between NMS documentation and Matt's. Which is right?
What's this $emulate_matts_code thing all about?
I'm getting a 'Badness' error. What does this mean?
The programs keep crashing with flock unimplemented, why?
But I don't have sendmail on my web-server, what can I do?
Is Simple Search broken - it can't find text in my PDF files?
My ISP won't let me use formmail because they say it is insecure.
I am getting the Error ' Too late for -T option', what can I do ?
I'm getting 'Missing Referrer - Access Denied' with FormMail
I would like to use 'windmail' instead of 'nms_sendmail' but I keep getting an error.
When I try to run your program, I get an 'Internal Server Error'. What does that mean?
How do I fix this 'Internal Server Error' ?
I call the FormMail program and get 'close mailprog: $?=256,$!= at ...'?
I call the FormMail program and get Broken Pipe errors?
FormMail allows invalid e-mail addresses to be entered. Why?
I try to open guestbook.pl on my Mac, and the document is too large.
I get an error telling me to use POST method, but I already am.
I use one of your programs but want it to do something more. Will you do it?
I use FormMail but want it to do something more. Will you do it?

NAME

Frequently Asked Questions about running the nms CGI programs. If a question is not specific to

<-- $Date: 2004/08/15 14:21:34 $ -->

DESCRIPTION

These are hopefully answers to question you will have when installing or running our programs.

How do I report a problem?

It is very easy to report a problem badly.

Saying "It doesn't work" is easy, and also pretty useless if you want us to help fix it. Our support form requests most of the information needed for generic cases, but there's a nice big text box for the stuff specific to you, but we don't know what that is. Here's how to figure it out and tell us.

Make sure you've read the entirety of this FAQ page. We cover a lot of common problems here, and you'll get a solution faster by reading this. Please also check that you are using the latest release of the program.

If you have a problem which isn't covered here, then you should include everything you have done in the report. This will make your problem report long. Don't worry about this, as it is good. We would rather have to read long problem reports, which include the information we need, than read a short bug report, and go several rounds of email to get that information.

If you have edited the program, paste in everything from the start of the program to the line which denotes the End of User Configurable Settings. You will probably not have changed most of these lines. It doesn't matter.

If you think that there might be a problem with one of your changes, and you think you know which one it is, but don't know how to correct it, include all the information anyway. It's easier to ignore what we know we don't need, than to ask for information we might.

There is a conflict between NMS documentation and Matt's. Which is right?

For our programs, our documentation is definitive :-) . Where the program and the documentation do not match this is considered a bug to be found and corrected. Additionally, if you find some of our documentation unclear, please report that to the support list and we will take a look to see if it can be improved.

There are, occassionally, small changes between what Matt did, and what we do. These are all documented, including why. Please see the next question for details.

What's this $emulate_matts_code thing all about?

In some cases, Matt's way of doing things isn't the best. However we've set ourselves the target that all of our programs should be able to work exactly the same way as Matt's originals. If you set $emulate_matts_code to 1, then the nms script will work exactly the the same way. If you set it to , then our script will be free to do some things in a more sensible way, but it might not be able to deal with data created with Matt's scripts.

I'm getting a 'Badness' error. What does this mean?

It means that you should check for a newer version of the relevant program. This error was significantly more common in older versions of our programs.

If you still get the error with the latest version, see above on submitting support requests.

The programs keep crashing with `flock unimplemented`, why?

Hasn't anyone told you that Windows 98 is not a server operating system?

Unfortunately on Windows 95 and 98 there is no support whatsoever for advisory locking like flock, Perl does not try to emulate it because it would have to behave completely differently. You could try commenting out the lines in the affected programs with a '#', but you should be warned that this will lead to other side effects as these operating systems implement a 'mandatory non-blocking lock' on files open for writing: that is to say that if one process has a file open so it can write to it and a second process attempts to open the same file (whether for writing or reading only) then the second attempt will simply fail and there will be an error message. This is alright for testing or development purposes where you are unlikely to have more than one person using the program at the same time, but would be far from ideal for a public website.

But I don't have `sendmail` on my web-server, what can I do?

Well, if your web-server has a Unix-like operating system it is likely that it has a program that performs a similar function for the preferred MTA on that system. QMail has a program called qmail-inject which takes similar command line options to sendmail, indeed on some systems the program that is available as sendmail is actually qmail-inject. Exim and Postfix also have their own equivalents - you should ask your system administrator or web hosting provider for more information on this.

If you are on a Windows web-server then you probably don't have a local MTA at all, although this is not to say that you will not be able to use FormMail. There will almost certainly be some kind of mail server (an SMTP server) on your network. You can configure FormMail to use that instead. For example, you can use

  $mailprog = 'SMTP:mail.example.com';

to use the SMTP server at mail.example.com. Your system administrator will be able to tell you the address of your local SMTP server. See the definition of the $mailprog variable in the README file that comes with FormMail for more details.

Notice that the SMTP:mail.example.com syntax means that our old nms_sendmail program is no longer needed and therefore it is no Notice that the SMTP:mail.example.com syntax means that our old nms_sendmail program is no longer needed and therefore it is no longer available.

Is Simple Search broken - it can't find text in my PDF files?

The 'text' in a PDF file is stored as a page description, a sort of image file really, so the text that appears in the acrobat viewer doesn't actually appear literally in the file. If you are on a Unix-like system you can see this for yourself by doing 'strings *.pdf'. Simple Search really is *simple*, it looks for the plain-text strings that are specified on the form in the specified files, it won't find them in a PDF file.

A quick hack that we really don't think we would ever consider putting in the standard search.pl, because it depends on Ghostscript, would be to change, in the file search.pl, the line:

    open(FILE, "<$File::Find::name") or return;

to :

    if ( $File::Find::name =~ /\.pdf$/i )
    {
       open(FILE, "/usr/bin/ps2ascii $File::Find::name|") or return;
    }
    else
    {  
       open(FILE, "<$File::Find::name") or return;
    }

This does depend on there being a recent version of Ghostscript installed and ps2ascii being located as above (it might of course be /usr/local/bin or /opt/bin or wherever :).

The above comes with no warranty whatsoever.

My ISP won't let me use formmail because they say it is insecure.

Well for one thing you could tell them that you are using the NMS FormMail and that is secure from all of the known problems with earlier Form to Email programs and more besides :) On the other hand they have every right to be skeptical of that claim.

Part of the problem is that there are other Form to E-Mail programs that are widely used that will allow mail to be sent to anyone by anyone on the Internet and this fact has become widely known, as a consequence there are spammers out there who are using search engines to find instances of FormMail.pl on the Internet which they can try to use to send spam anonymously in the belief that all FormMail programs can be made to do this.

The very fact of this scanning and testing by spammers seems to upset some ISPs (probably rightly) and they have taken steps to remove or disable any CGI program called 'formmail.pl'.

However there is absolutely no reason why FormMail.pl has to be called that, when you upload it you can changes its name to 'twinklepops.pl' or anything at all and as long as you remember to change the form as well then it will work perfectly fine.

You could also mail your ISP and point them to the NMS project -- for the benefit of both you and their other customers.

I am getting the Error ' Too late for -T option', what can I do ?

The '-T' turns on Perl's taint checking, this basically means that data coming from outside the program is marked as 'tainted' (untrustworthy) and attempts to use that data in certain ways will result in an error in the program unless the data is checked carefully. All secure CGI programs should use taint checking, as the Internet is a fundamentally insecure medium.

That you are getting this error probably suggests that your web server is Microsoft IIS. If the administrator of the web server is open to making changes to the configuration probably the best idea would be to have them create a new association for your cgi-bin directory for files with a .plt extension:

   .plt   -->  C:\perl\bin\perl.exe -T %s %s

where the C:\perl\bin\ should be changed to the appropriate path to where the perl executable is installed. You should then rename any NMS programs you want to use with a .plt extension rather than .pl. The way that this configuration is actually done differs between versions of IIS, so you will need to consult the documentation for your version if you want to do it yourself.

The reason that you have to do this is because Windows does not have the notion of the shebang (#!) line that Unix has to tell the OS how to run an interpreted program (using associations between an extension and a program that will run it instead). When a Perl program is run by Windows it is always as if it had been run like:

    perl program.pl

(Apache on Windows appears to behave like Unix but infact this behaviour is emulated ). Now when Perl runs reads a program file in before running it one of the first things that it does is to check the check the shebang line and if it contains 'perl' it will parse it to find if there are any switches there that should be applied and (with one or two exceptions) it applies them (as an aside, if 'perl' is not found in the line it will try to use what is found there as program to be executed with the script name as an argument). The '-T' is one of the exceptions because by the time that perl has discovered that you want to turn taint checking on it is already too late to ensure that all of the environment that the program inherits is properly 'tainted' and rather than compromise the security checks that tainting affords it is safer to abandon the program altogether.

Of course because the taint checking is based on the source of the data and how it is being used and because this don't really change from one environment to another it is fairly safe to say that if we have tested the program with the '-T' switch than it is relatively safe to remove it if you have to. Of course if you remove tainting and then make alterations to the program such that new data is introduced or existing data is used in a different way then you may be unwittingly introducing a new vulnerability.

I'm getting 'Missing Referrer - Access Denied' with FormMail

This happens if your browser doesn't send the HTTP 'referer' header, preventing FormMail from checking that the referring page is on the allowed list. Some personal firewalls cause this problem, by removing the referer header from all outgoing HTTP requests.

The fix is to set the '$allow_empty_ref' configuration variable to 1 in the FormMail script. If the copy of FormMail.pl that you're using doesn't have $allow_empty_ref, then you need to grab a newer version from <http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/scripts.shtml>.

I would like to use 'windmail' instead of 'nms_sendmail' but I keep getting an error.

Windmail is a commercial program for Windows that can be used as a replacement for the 'sendmail' that is found on Unix systems. It will work in the NMS FormMail if you set $mailprog is set to:

   $mailprog = 'c:/path/to/windmail.exe -t';

(Obviously adjusting the path as necessary). This will enable the mail to be sent, but, because NMS FormMail is careful to check the success of the running of $mailprog and because windmail uses an exit code of 1 rather than 0 to indicate success an error message will be generated after the mail has been sent. This can be worked round by making a small alteration to the program.

In FormMail.pl you should find the line that is like:

 close (MAIL) || die "close mailprog: \$?=$?,\$!=$!";

and change it to something like:

 if ( close(MAIL) and $? != 256 ) {
     die "close mailprog: \$?=$?,\$!=$!";
 }

This will stop the error message.

When I try to run your program, I get an 'Internal Server Error'. What does that mean?

This (rather useless) error message generally means that your webserver tried to execute the program, but execution failed. This is most likely to be caused by the Perl program not being valid Perl.

Perl tries to run your program, finds an error, and throws up warnings. The webserver interprets these warnings as output from the CGI which it can't understand, and throws out an Internal Server Error.

If you have access to your web server's error logs, you can probably get more information as to precisely what caused the problem. If not, try the next question.

How do I fix this 'Internal Server Error' ?

Firstly, if the program, as you downloaded it from our website, does not work

Internal Server Errors, where you have edited the program yourself, are most commonly caused by typos during editing. These typos result in the program not being valid Perl, and errors confusing the webserver.

What you should initially do, is check every line you edited, to check that you have not left a set of quotes or brackets (of any variety) open. Having an opening ' without a corresponding " is a very common problem, and not easy to spot (especially when you have one of each and don't notice they are different).

If you really can not see what the problem is, try redownloading the program from our website, and uploading it to your webserver without any changes. If the problem goes away, then make your changes to the program one at a time, testing each time you make a change. This makes debugging much easier.

If everything works, compare the version that works, with your original that didn't, and see where the original was broken.

If it still doesn't work, then contact our support list, and include all the information you possibly can.

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