I have just installed OpenBSD on an old box that comes with Apache version
1.3.29. Running the basic server out of the box is fine. I can't get CGI
to work however.

I wrote the script recommended on the Apache web page called first.pl.

When I try to run this script through the server I get the following errors:
>[Tue Feb 22 22:18:42 2005] [error] (2)No such file or directory: exec of /cgi-bin/first.pl failed
>[Tue Feb 22 22:18:42 2005] [error] [client 192.168.0.107] Premature end of script headers: /cgi-bin/first.pl

The first is the source of the problem meaning that Apache cannot find the
perl interpreter for some reason. I know that perl is in /usr/bin/perl
(at least this is what `which perl` tells me) and I wrote the script
using vi on the BSD box, so the problem is not the trailing \CR.
In fact execution of
/var/www/cgi-bin/first.pl produces the desired output.

I saw some mention in a newsgroup that www should not have a UID or GID
below 500, so I changed them to no avail.

This is incredibly frustrating to not be able to do the most basic task.
Any or advice would be greatly appreciated. I know this question has
been posted a million times, so I appologize for asking it again, but I
have checked all the standard problems that I can find.

Sincerely,
TJ Walls

> The first is the source of the problem meaning that Apache cannot find the
> perl interpreter for some reason. I know that perl is in /usr/bin/perl
> (at least this is what `which perl` tells me) and I wrote the script
> using vi on the BSD box, so the problem is not the trailing \CR.
> In fact execution of
> /var/www/cgi-bin/first.pl produces the desired output.
>

I found the solution, it is OpenBSD specific and I thought I would post it
here for posterity. The OpenBSD install (wisely) chroot(8) jails the Apache
webserver. So in /var/www (the ServerRoot, i.e. the jail) I had to create
a usr directory and copy all the files found by ldd `which perl`. I got
the basic script to run in the way.

Thanks,
TJ Walls