I worte some cgi scripts with Perl on my home PC: Win2k Professional, Perl 5.8.6 and MySQL 4.1.13. When I uploaded these to my website, they didn't work. Here's one script, dumbed doen to the point where its just a "Hello World" type of thing with some cgi afterwards: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use DBI;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp "fatalsToBrowser";

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:database=dbname;host=localhost",
             "uname", 
             "pword") 
        or die "Unable to connect to DB:  $DBI::errstr";
$dbh->disconnect();

print header,
      start_html(-title=>'Title',
                 -BGCOLOR=>'blue',
                 -text=>'white'),
      p('test'),
      end_html;

[download]

My web hosting service uses Perl 5.8.4 and MySQL 5.0.18.

Running this script via Firefox yields a blank white page; clicking "View Source" bring up a completely blank window. In IE, I get a "Cannot find server/this page cannot be displayed" error. Nothing shows up in the error log. If I remove the "dbh->connect" line, the page functions properly.

Even if I've mucked up the connection string somehow, shouldn't any error be posted to the browser via fatalsToBrowser? I am getting no feedback on what might be going wrong, and I am stumped.

Help!

Kevin

In reply to dbh connections: stumped! by kevin

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