pfaut has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm doing some work for a company I used to work for. While I worked there, I set up a webserver on VMS and wrote some perl CGI programs which allowed their customers to enter data into the system. I used the OSU DECthreads web server and a package called Crinoid to allow the perl programs to be persistent. The perl apps are nearly standard CGI scripts. The only difference is a global variable telling Crinoid that it's ok to reuse the script.

Occassionally, things would hang. Lately it's been hanging quite often. There's plenty of evidence to say their NT 4.0 based Alta Vista firewall is causing at least some of the problems (it insists on writing hostnames to logs and I can't find a way to turn this off, there are other problems, too) but I've also seen the main Crinoid process hang. I can't figure out what's keeping it from processing messages. After a short while, all the application processes exit complaining about not receiving heartbeat messages.

I went looking for the Crinoid software recently but it no longer appears to be on the internet. The site linked above has a bunch of information but no longer has the software. Crinoid was written by Dr. Charles (Chuck) Lane. I did a google search for him but he seems to have disappeared from the net about a year ago. The last message I could find attributed to him anywhere was dated last April. I could not find the software anywhere.

Is anyone familiar with Crinoid, the OSU webserver, or other VMS based webservers that would allow me to run persistent perl scripts? The above setup works quite well while it works. I can fallback to running the scripts as real CGI scripts but that would probably result in a 10 fold performance reduction.

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Need a Perl capable VMS based web server
by Elian (Parson) on Mar 18, 2003 at 13:58 UTC
    There's always apache and mod_perl, which does work on VMS. DEC^WCompaq^WHP provides it as a free download, so go snag it if you need it.
[reply]

      I looked into HP's apache for VMS this morning. Unfortunately, the servers are running VMS V6.2 and it looks like apache wants V7.1 or later.

      However, a little more digging today and I found the WASD server. It looks like it might be derived from the OSU server that was in use here. I'm trying to install it now but I'm still open to other suggestions.

      ---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
        Apache definitely wants 7.1 -- I did the initial mod_perl port, and it depends on some stuff that came in with 7.1.

        WASD's not an OSU-derivitive, but it may well do what you need, which'd be nice.

        I'd ask if you could upgrade, but if you've not left 6.2 as it is, that's not likely. 6.2 and 7.x can be clustered, though--have you considered throwing a small 7.[123[]] box into the cluster to act as the webserver?

[reply]

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