Is this correct? 1

[audiopro]

I have a problem with a sendmail function taking a good few hours to send emails from my scripts. There are 5 sites spread over 3 seperate domains all hosted by the same ISP.
Up until a week ago, all the scripts were sending emails almost straight away, now I have a long delay.
I contacted the ISP's support and they replied with this.

Thank you for contacting Support.

I checked the setup for ???????????.co.uk and found that permisions for the files were set to 711, for cgi scripts to work effectively they need to be setup as 755 permissions.

I have been running scripts set to 711 for years, am I really doing it wrong?
By the way, they have changed the settings and it has made no difference to the speed of the emails.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[ishnid]

Permissions won't ever affect the speed of anything. They merely dictate whether or not the script can be run at all.

As Perl scripts are interpreted, they need read and execute permissions to run. If it was a compiled CGI script, execute only would be fine (see here). If you were getting away with 711, it seems likely that the server has suexec installed (meaning that the script is being run under your userid, which has read, write and execute permissions). If so, you should be able to still run the scripts with permissions set to 500.

 

[audiopro]

Thanks for the info
Scripts require a min. of 711 to run on this particular ISP. I was not aware that the permissions had to be set to a min. of 755 but I know now thanks to you.
They are saying that the email problem is due to permissions but I am not convinced. They have a support ticket system which sends automatic confirmation emails. The last few have taken over 24 hours to arrive. Normal emails through the ISP arrive almost immediately but even their server side sourced emails are very slow. I don't think they can blame me for the speed of their own scripts(Can they?).

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[travs69]

You should verify that the problem isn't with your receiving end. We had a ISP marked by our ISP as a company who's emails needed extra filtering and it slowed their emails down to a crawl. I would suggest doing some tests by sending emails to a gmail/hotmail account if you aren't already.

 

[audiopro]

To close this thread, the ISP now admit to a server suffering a spam attack and are sorting the problem.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[ishnid]

Glad it's getting sorted. I'd still be wary about an ISP whose tech support people think that *nix permissions can cause scripts to run slower.

 

[audiopro]

To be fair, I think the explanation got lost in transalation between the techs and the customer services guy. CS guy has a very English first name and a far from English surname and lives a long way from anywhere I have ever been. The techs are UK based - Progress eh!

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[ishnid]

Ah, the well-known Colin Djuyrozhnyihno? ;-)

 

[audiopro]

Ah! Youve dealt with him too!

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[KevinADC]

Most of these tech support people are just customer support people with a trouble shooting manual they use to look up a list of possible problems:

problem: TV has no picture

1. Is it plugged into a working outlet?
a. Is the cicuit breaker on?
b. Is the voltage correct?

2. Is it turned on?
a. Try on/off switch
b. Is the sleep timer set to zero?
c. Check internal fuse (repair man only)

etc
etc
etc
etc

they then give you boiler plate replies:

Try plugging in the TV.
Check the curcuit breaker.
Call repair man.

If you get a tech support person that actually knows what they are doing you will be very lucky.




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- Kevin, perl coder unexceptional!