Getting Information About Perl on Your Classic Web Hosting

[Contents]

Getting Information About Perl on Your Classic Web Hosting

Attention! Are you on the right page?

This help page answers a question about Cruzio Classic Web Hosting. Classic Web Hosting is domain hosting purchased from Cruzio before July of 2006.

If you purchased Cruzio's Website Basic, Plus and Premium hosting, or if you had your Cruzio Classic hosting updated, please see the Web Hosting FAQ instead.

Contents

• Introduction
• Getting and Installing PerlDiver
• Using PerlDiver
• Best Practices

Introduction

This help page is about using PerlDiver. PerlDiver is a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script for people writing Perl scripts for their websites. On a given server, PerlDiver lists extensive information on the server's Perl installation(s), including

• Server program paths
• Environment variables
• Installed modules

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Getting and Installing PerlDiver

1. Download PerlDiver from here and unzip the downloaded archive file.  You can also download it directly from their official website.
2. Using the examples below as a reference, edit the first line of the PerlDiver CGI script (the file with the .cgi extension) to list the path to the server's Perl installation.

Note: there are two versions of Perl available, Perl 5
and Perl 5.8. You can use whichever you prefer.

Example for Perl 5:
#! /usr/local/bin/perl

Example for Perl 5.8:
#! /usr/local/bin/perl5_8

3. Access your Web space with an FTP program. Within your domain's pub_html directory, create a cgi-bin directory.
4. With your FTP program's transfer mode set to ASCII, upload the PerlDiver CGI script to the pub_html/cgi-bin directory.
5. Set the permissions of the cgi-bin directory and all its contents to 755.

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Using PerlDiver

Open your Web browser and navigate to

http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/perldiver11.cgi

where yourdomain.com is the name of your own domain. (As of this writing, PerlDiver is at version 1.1, and the filename is perldiver11.cgi. If you require a different version of PerlDiver, please change file name accordingly.)

You should now be able to view information about the server's Perl installation and modules.

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Best Practices

Be sure to remove or disable PerlDiver after it has run. If you leave it enabled, hackers can get information about your installation that they can use to exploit it.

One way to disable PerlDiver would be to remove it completely from your website space. To do so, you would just remove or delete PerlDiver from the cgi-bin folder.

Another way would be to disable it would be to set the permissions on the PerlDiver file to 644. This would only allow write/read permissions to the administrator and read permission to everyone else.

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