Ubuntu Lucid, cgi-bin, and MathTex

Question

So I have several dedicated servers out there running Ubuntu Lucid server. They primarily run WordPress sites - LAMP. However, one of my original sites is a controls engineering site that uses MathTex to render the equations.

MathTex is pretty hard on servers. The engineering site is still hosted on the original VPS which runs something like CentOS (but that's irrelevant). The traffic and numbers of renderings that MathTex creates cause resource issues with my VPS. I've been able to allocate more resources to the VPS but ultimately this gets expensive. So I'd like to offload the equation rendering to my dedicated servers all of which are much more powerful and under-utilized.

So I've followed the instructions on installing and compiling MathTex. And MathTex works fine from the command line. However, when I attempt to call the script via my browser the browsers all try download the cgi file (I've tested on Firefox and Chrome on 2 machines).

This led me to attempt to compile and install on my home Ubuntu box that is Ubuntu desktop. The command line works fine. However, again when calling the function in my browser it wanted to download the file instead of rendering an equation. So I moved the mathtex.cgi script to /usr/lib/cgi-bin. Still no go. Then I changed /usr/lib/cgi-bin to 777 and it worked. I changed /usr/lib/cgi-bin to 755 and it stopped working.

So my home box works when /usr/lib/cgi-bin is 777. I tried that one of my dedicated Ubuntu servers and still no go. My browser still attempts to download the file.

The directive for Apache to find the cgi-bin directory is in /etc/apache/site-available/default. And at a quick glance they appear to be identical (I haven't yet studied every character).

Answer 1

FYI

I got some help from my hosting company. They are generally pretty good but this is outside the scope of what they provide for free. So when I was switching servers I had a couple of password issues and managed to tack this question on as well.

The support person finally got the mathtex.cgi script to run by creating a /cgi-bin under the domain's folder. Making that folder 777 and adding an AddHandler cgi-script to the http.conf. Then he restarted Apache2.

I had been putting mathtex.cgi under a generic /cgi-bin directory that I had intended to share among all the domains as needed. And this generic /cgi-bin directory appeared to be what the MathTex installation instructions were suggesting.

Hope this helps someone else.