Plugging holes in my web services

I do need to start sorting a list of priorities on jobs that I need to do rather than continually fire fighting. Wednesday I started having a quick look at why the map services were not working. This is actually something that has not been working for some time, and while it's not something I need working, it would be nice to restore. Getting back up to speed on this area has been hampered by my not having properly documented things in the past, although the LSCES website does have a lot of useful material, and it's mapper package is the one I am looking to restore. That this is now displaying "msLoadConfig(): Unable to access file. See mapserver.org/mapfile/config.html for more information." is the result of my activity yesterday with help ( or perhaps hindrance ) from Mistral and search engine digging. It took most of the day to get to the point where a cgi test script was actually running. The main problem was down to getting fcgiwrap working with nginx despite the fact that php was already working fine with nginx even down to my being able to select different versions of php. While I could control the fcgiwrap service and I was sure that everything was set properly, I kept hitting a 403 error when trying to run the test script and mapserv. That Mistral was giving me pointers to where to look for an error, it missed the key part which was that the missing error was hidden in the main 'messages' log and throwing that into the search engine eventually nailed things down and we are now able to run cgi scrips. I'll document that on the LSCES site. I was sort of planning to retire that and consolidate on the other sites, but looking at the hundreds of pages of material, it needs to be retained and updated with current crib sheets.

Update ... a day on and I've followed the crib sheet to bring the development machine up to the same level. ALMOST got everything right, but missed making the test.cgi file executable. After that one last adjustment I have both machines running cgi files nicely. NOW to have a go at making mapserv operational ...