Hi,
My forum has worked wonderfully for quite a few years until this week!
I have been alerted by a number of members if they reply to a message and click 'Post Reply' they get a new window appear titled Opening Blah.pl as per attached picture. This obviously shouldn't happen!! If I click cancel it goes away and then do a refresh on the page the reply appears as it should on the forum.

This also happens on ther boxes I click on but not all.

Can anybody help as its really annoying why its just started to happen have I been hacked? - I have checked the files on the server and can see an which have changed date recently to cause this?

Many thanks,
John

Double check your file permissions (CHMOD)

You could also try to do a board rebuild,  but it looks like a file permission setting

Hi Nat,
Thank for your help on this as I do need to fix it!
I have checked the permissions against the new installation permisions and it all looks ok - I list the permissions as below in case I have missed one and it is wrong.
I have found if I select rebuild All Boards the window pops up - but if I click save the file it will save a Blah.pl file on my pc which when opened is empty - if I reply to a message and click Post Reply which brings up the window and click save, another Blah(1).pl file is saved on my pc the message is posted onto the forum.
Strange this started happening when i haven't done any changes on the server.

Any more help or ideas would be much appreciated.
John

File or directory name     Permissions
cgi-bin/forum     777
cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl     755
cgi-bin/forum/Mods     777     
cgi-bin/forum/Prefs     777     (Files in folder are 644)
cgi-bin/forum/Settings.pl     666     
cgi-bin/forum/Languages/English     777     
cgi-bin/forum/Mods/Modules     777     
cgi-bin/forum/Prefs/BHits     777     
cgi-bin/forum/Prefs/Hits     777     
cgi-bin/forum/Prefs/Sessions     777
cgi-bin/forum/members      755     (member dat and log files 644)
cgi-bin/forum/messages   755 ( .view and .txt files 644)
cgi-bin/forum/Boards     755 (files in folder set to 644)
cgi-bin/forum/code    755 (files in folder set to 755)

public_html/blahdocs                   755 (.js files in folder are 644)
public_html/blahdocs/Avatars     777     (Files in folder are 644 )
public_html/blahdocs/buttons     777     (Files in folder are 644 )
public_html/blahdocs/images     777     (Files in folder are 644 )
public_html/blahdocs/Random     777     
public_html/blahdocs/Smilies     777     (Files in folder are 644 )
public_html/blahdocs/template     777     (Files in folder are 644 except news.html 777)
public_html/blahdocs/uploads     777     (Files in folder are 644 )
public_html/blahdocs/images/icons     777     
public_html/blahdocs/images/admincenter/mainconfig.png     644     
public_html/blahdocs/template/News.html     777     
public_html/blahdocs/template/X2         777     
public_html/blahdocs/template/X3             777     
public_html/blahdocs/uploads/thumbnails     777     

Hi there,

Having spent some time looking at the permissions I couldn't see anything which had changed or was incorrect.
I then installed another eblah forum in a different directory structure to check that it would work on my ISP (heart internet) and it worked a treat no sign of the blah.pl window popping up when posting messages.

Looking at the files and swapping some over onto the new forum, the only one where the window does pop up is if I replace the settings.pl file.

I attach the speadsheet which shows in coloum B the contents of the settings.pl file for the forum which causes the window to pop up and in coloum I s the contents of the settings.pl file for the newly installed forum which works fine. I have inserted spaces so to line up the same commands to see the differences. The items in red I have tried changing but this hasn't fixed the problem.

Can anybody spot the differences which would cause the fault. Hopefully I have done the right thing trying to de-bug it!

Are the instances of double forward slashes ( as in // ) which appear in lines 18, 23, 25, and 48 intentional?

It's just something I've never seen before, and wonder what effect it has, since it seems to imply the presence of a sub-directory with no name, and I'm not sure if that is valid (and I don't know where to check this syntax, so I can only raise the observation as a query - I've probably made a fool of myself just by asking ).

I also don't follow what you describe here:

Quoted Text

I have found if I select rebuild All Boards the window pops up - but if I click save the file it will save a Blah.pl file on my pc which when opened is empty - if I reply to a message and click Post Reply which brings up the window and click save, another Blah(1).pl file is saved on my pc the message is posted onto the forum.

Blah.pl runs on the server, so there shouldn't be anything being written to you local PC (other than the hot subject of cookies at the moment).

If that is what is happening, and empty (or 0 byte) Blah.pl files are being dumped there, then where (what directory) are they being dropped in?

The inconsistency of this is a real problem, since the browser's call for a program to handle an unidentified extension should happen every time (until one is saved), not just sometime and to some users.

Puzzling

Hi Apollo,
Firstly thank you for taking the time to help.

The double forward slashes ( as in // ) I agree dont look right but as I haven't used this temperory forum for anything else except trying to post messages I did ignore this!

I agree Blah.pl runs on the server, so there shouldn't be anything being written to your local PC but every member of the forum when they try to post a message gets a window Blah.pl pop up and an empty (or 0 byte) Blah.pl file saved on there local PC in a download area or where ever they have set a folder to download files to.

Sorry if I have confused you there is no inconsistency as it happens all the time to all members on different computers when a message is posted. While I was trying other things I found the Blah.pl window also happened by clicking on 'rebuild All Boards' in the admin area.

What do you think about using the settings.pl file from my temp forum and then putting back in the settings from the admin area to get back to a working forum - I guess I cant manually edit the settings file as it states !

Thanks,
John  

Don't expect a lot (I have zero knowledge of perl, as the forum is only thing I use that is written in it, so anything that worries me in the code takes forever to chase around a manual to make sense of for a few minutes.)

Just thinking out loud, if the browser is downloading a 0 byte file - as opposed to the populated Blah.pl file - then my assumption would be a pathing error.

In other words, it has called the file, but cannot find it and cannot handle it (which it should do since MIME will tell it to run .pl scripts as perl) when this fails, it asks for instruction, and is saving the file.

Since the file doesn't exist where it is looking on the server, it starts the download by creating the empty file mentioned, then stops since there is nothing to save in it.

And that appears to be consistent as per your explanation, which is a good thing, since it removes what I thought was a random element.

As regards the double forward slash, this does actually have a meaning in terms of domains and shells - but this only something I have read about rather than used, so don't really know what it might do

However, since this affect pathing, and pathing seems to be the problem here, it might be worth reading about.

The // might be interpreted as the start of the path part way along the string - but I stress this is merely a guess!!!

I do know from the past that fiddling with settings.pl is not advised (at least not without Justin or a list of the allowed values and an explanation of the entries, as some are not intuitive, and stabbing things in can really break a forum big time), and using the Admin console is really the way to go.

But sometimes it can't be avoided.

Just make sure you have copies of the files made before starting to fiddle, as that means you can get back to the original if all fails completely. Even if it is not perfect, then at least it only has the original problem, and not self-inflicted ones on top!

On that same suggestion, if you have a backup from the time before this problem appeared, then since you seem to have pinned things down to something awry within settings.pl then you could extract just setting.pl from that backup, and place it in the current install.

In theory, that should take you back to state when it was all working ok.

But it does depend on having an pre-problem backup available

If not, then provided you make copies, I can't see any reason not to give the 'working' settings.pl from the temp install a try, and edit the paths to suit.

The worst it can do is not work, and that just means reverting to the saved copy of the original, to return to the common starting point of the original problem.

The double slashes are something Heartinternet installer chucks ni there.  It did it with mine but it's worked fine sinse 2009...

Have a look at Blah.pl on your server.  Is the very 1st line exactly like this   #!/usr/bin/perl ?
Does it happen the same n Firefox?  IE? Chrome?

After impishd's post, I still wonder about the host (Heartinternet) maybe having changed something - in which case trying to fix it here is a waste of time.

When you browser (any browser) encounters a .pl file, the host should signal via MIME that the it should be run as a perl file, and not just read and/or displayed...

MIME types tell browsers how to handle specific extensions. For example, perl MIME type equates to .pl ,plx .ppl .perl and .pm extensions on most servers, and this tells your browser to interpret all files with those extensions as perl files.

The fact that all your forum visitors are experiencing the same problem is a reasonably sure sign that the problem resides with the server side of things.

This may be what you are trying to pin down here, by looking at setting.pl - but if you did  not change anything before the problem appeared, then the hosting service has to be suspect, and asked if anything has been changed there.

There is also the matter of Apache Handlers (which can be found in your control panel near the MIME handlers, which also control how pl scripts are handled.

A check here should show that the .pl appears as a system handler already in place to handle cgi-scripts. If not, there's a problem.

I've no experience of Heartinternet, but I have suffered problems with my own hosting service as some features have suddenly stopped working.

Fortunately, they are reasonably communicative, and usually confess to having added stricter security rules to their servers (so barring some of my requests for scripts). I could have spent useless hours trying to fault-find my own scripts - but they admitted the cause when I passed them the details/symptoms, and saved me trying to fix a problem I did not actually have.

Have you quizzed your host about this problem?

Many thanks for all the advice.

I have been in touch with Heart and they say nothing has changed so nothing should have been affected!!

Knowing the settings.pl file was at fault I have been working through all the lines and found its the line $redirectfix = 2; - if I remove this from the settings file I can post messages fine without the Blah.pl window opening.

Any ideas what $redirectfix = 2; is doing, should it be included in the settings.pl file?

No idea (remember I suggested way back that the keys were not intuitive) - I don't think there was ever a list.

I do know that when the change I have built into my forum were introduced, in order to make the work, another of those keys had to be changed - but Justin provided the correct value for me.

I had a look through the the past problems listed in here, and checked my own Setting file.

You might want to try the following (from the notes, and my file) rather than having the value undefined, which may not be stable...

$redirectfix = 0;

Many thanks for spending time checking your forum for values as I agree for stability it should be set to something if it was specifing a value. Testing it tonight and it all seems ok with $redirectfix = 0;

Terrific - so pleased to get to it working again thanks to all who helped out on here.

Quoted from John W

Many thanks for all the advice.

I have been in touch with Heart and they say nothing has changed so nothing should have been affected!!

Knowing the settings.pl file was at fault I have been working through all the lines and found its the line $redirectfix = 2; - if I remove this from the settings file I can post messages fine without the Blah.pl window opening.

Any ideas what $redirectfix = 2; is doing, should it be included in the settings.pl file?

It changes the redirect type. You can find that setting in Admin > Settings. The default should be the location redirect.