Re: Problem configuring isapi_fcgi.dll with IIS 5.0

You might want to try cgi-fcgi.exe instead of Shane's DLL.

It will compile under cygwin,  and works pretty well.

Althought I've previously gotten the DLL to work with perl (and I'm not
sure what you've missed below),  it's painful to troubleshoot problems
because it's so opaque (errors are cryptic, and there's no logging).

With cgi-fcgi,  you can launch and debug your scripts from the command
line.  If it works there,  you're just a mime-type mapping away from it
working under IIS.

John Sequeira
http://www.jsequeira.com/blog


Todd S. Greene wrote:
> Hello everyone, I'm totally new here and this is my first post.
> 
> Just to let you know, I'm not any kind of IIS or Apache administrator,
> I'm a programmer and have been coding Perl since last summer. As I'm
> starting to code more CGI applications, I'm realizing that I need to get
> some kind of persistence going with the web server to improve CGI
> performance. I started digging around with Google a few days ago on this
> and from discussion I was reading I decided that FastCGI and "use FCGI"
> in my Perl was the way to go.
> 
> Okay, great! But now what? I have already installed the FCGI module for
> Perl on the web server, and I have to configure my web server (IIS 5.0
> running on a Windows 2000 Server platform) to use FastCGI. So I do a
> little more digging around, and I think I see that what I need to do is
> download Shane Caraveo's isapi_fcgi.dll and do some configuration.
> 
> Hmmm... The documentation is a little hairy, a couple of items are not
> explained well even though I do a lot of Googling, but I write down my
> own summary of configuration steps, and then proceed. Here are the steps
> I have written down and performed:
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> 1. Copy the "isapi_fcgi.dll" to an appropriate location, such as:
> C:\Perl\fastcgi\
> 
> 2. Make the following registry key:
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/FASTCGI/.fcg
> 
> Add the following two values to this key:
> AppPath C:\perl\bin\perl.exe
> BindPath php-fcgi
> 
> [Note: When I read Shane Caraveo's readme file, he states that the
> "BindPath" parameter is required, but not the "AppPath" value. This
> doesn't seem right to me? But perhaps without AppPath the .dll is
> searching for the Perl path from some other information location that
> Windows has stored somewhere? I don't know, but I put the "AppPath"
> value on my list as something I definitely need to put in the registry.
> The "BindPath" is more problemmatic to me. First of all, I'm not really
> sure what it is used for, and Shane does not explain it. The only
> example he gives is with a value of "php-fcgi" and since he gives no
> explanation for "BindPath" I have no idea if "php-fcgi" is a required
> value or if I have some choice here and what any logical choices would
> even be. Googling about this provides absolutely no further help -
> indeed, I find other people asking the same question and getting zero
> answers! Initially I even tried a value of "fcg-fcgi" (thinking that the
> first 3 letters might correspong to the extension letters?), but I had
> the same problem. Doesn't work.]
> 
> 3. In IIS on Win2000, add the dll as an allowed ISAPI extension.
> 
> [Note: Again, it was through my googling that I picked up this
> particular configuration step. That's all it said. My further experience
> is this, but again please note that I'm NOT a web server administrator
> by profession and I'm only dabbling in this as I need to to get things
> set up for my web-related programs to work on some client sites. I hope
> I have not misinterpreted the wording of this step, but what I did was
> open the Properties for the website(s) I'm interested in configuring
> this for (in other words, from what I saw I believe this step must be
> performed *by site* in IIS) and then select the "ISAPI Filter" tab. Then
> I added the isapi_fcgi.dll to the list (and you may very well have an
> empty list to start with) where you basically just make a name for the
> item (I just named it "fastcgi") and then give it the path to the dll,
> such as, say "C:\perl\fastcgi\isapi_fcgi.dll".]
> 
> 4. Open IIS, go to the cgi directory (or other relevant directory) and:
> a. Edit Properties.
> b. Click on Configuration button.
> c. Add ".fcg" to the App Mappings with the executable
> path set to the dll (i.e., the same path used in
> step 3).
> 
> [Note here that one comment I read when googling stated explicitly that
> you need to turn ON the "Check that file exists" flag for this one. So I
> did.]
> 
> 5. Restart IIS.
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> Okay I've done all this, and still nothing works. Sometimes I get "The
> page cannot be displayed" error (further text "The page you are looking
> for is currently unavailable"), but other times I get nothing but a
> single line of text that says "Server Error, unable to connect to
> fastcgi server." Here is the text of my Perl program:
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl -wT
> 
> use strict;
> use warnings;
> use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
> use FCGI;
> 
> sub main();
> 
> BEGIN
> {
> # for CGI app, set immediate flushing of file handle output buffers
> select(STDOUT); $| = 1;
> select(STDERR); $| = 1;
> 
> $ENV{'PATH'} = ''; # good CGI security practice
> 
> if (($^O eq "MSWin32") && ($#ARGV == -1))
> {
> $ENV{'SCRIPT_FILENAME'} = $0;
> $ENV{'SCRIPT_FILENAME'} =~ s|\\|/|g;
> $ENV{'PATH_INFO'} =~ /^$ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'}(.*)$/;
> my $path_info = $1;
> $ENV{'SCRIPT_FILENAME'} =~ /^(.*)$ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'}.*/;
> my $document_root = $1;
> $ENV{'PATH_TRANSLATED'} = $document_root . $path_info;
> }
> }
> 
> my $rc = main();
> exit($rc);
> 
> ###########################################################
> # start of main
> ###########################################################
> sub main() {
> # initialization code
> my $cnt = 0;
> 
> # response loop
> while (FCGI::accept >= 0)
> {
> print("Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n");
> print("<head>\n<title>FastCGI Demo Page
> (perl)</title>\n</head>\n<body>\n");
> print("<h1>FastCGI Demo Page (perl)</h1>\n");
> print("<p>This is coming from a FastCGI server.<br />\n");
> print("Running on <em>$ENV{SERVER_NAME}</em> to
> <em>$ENV{REMOTE_HOST}</em></p>\n");
> ++$cnt;
> print("<p>This is connection number $cnt</p>\n");
> print("</body>\n</html>\n");
> }
> 
> return(0);
> }
> ###########################################################
> # end of main
> ###########################################################
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> Note that if I run this as a regular CGI program (for which all I need
> to do is change the extension from ".fcg" to ".cgi" which extension I
> have already configured in IIS for my Perl CGI programs) it runs
> perfectly fine, I don't even have to strip out the FCGI-related code,
> but of course there is no persistence behavior (i.e., the connection
> number displayed on the page is always 1).
> 
> I'm thinking that obviously other people have configured IIS to run
> FastCGI-related Perl programs, using Shane Caraveo's "isapi_fcgi.dll",
> and have been running along fine with more efficient CGI processing for
> years, and there is something very simple I'm missing or have done not
> quite right.
> 
> Can anyone using Perl and FastCGI with IIS, who is using the
> isapi_fcgi.dll help me on this? I've tried to be very complete, but ask
> me anything else if you like.
> 
> Regards,
> Todd Greene
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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