March 17, 2005

CGI Server PHP Now Running In Safe Mode

The web server running on the CS department CGI and PHP server is now running PHP in Safe Mode. This has a number of implications for your php applications and is likely to break some existing php applications but this change was necessary for security reasons. For example, you will not be able to read files from your php scripts that you do not own.

One other change is that you will only be able to "exec" programs that are specifically listed as acceptable programs to run. If you need to exec a program in your php scripts, just let us know and we can add it to the list.

The best approach to take if you have existing php scripts you need to run is to just try them and see if they work. If they are now failing, you can watch the cgi server error log file (/l/cgi/apache/logs/error_log) for errors as you access your page.