Item1362: Foswiki/Sandbox.pm tries to close STDERR even if its already closed

Hi,

i try to run foswiki under lighttpd with fastcgi.

Now i get this when trying to register a user:

| 2009-03-24T13:21:29Z warning | Registration failed: Can't kill STDERR: 'No such file or directory' at /www/freigeist.org/foswiki/lib/Foswiki/Sandbox.pm line 478.

The code in question is:

            # Child - run the command
            untie(*STDERR);
            open( STDERR, '>', File::Spec->devnull() )
              || die "Can't kill STDERR: '$!'";

            unless ( exec( $path, @args ) ) {
                syswrite( STDOUT, $key . ": $!\n" );
                exit($key);
            }

Lighttpd closes STDERR before forking a (fast-)cgi-process. So I guess the problem is that STDERR is already closed.

Maybe you can safely omit the die() part. If not, you need to check first of STDERR is still open..

--> This whole issue, if i understand it correctly and the real error does not lay somewhere else, renders foswiki on a recent lighttpd pretty useless.. So you may raise the priority..

-- FiSh - 24 Mar 2009

What lighttpd version are you using? What's the result of perl -MFile::Spec -le 'print File::Spec->devnull()'?

-- GilmarSantosJr - 24 Mar 2009

I was going to ask that. Aren't you chroot'ed somewhere and the /dev/null doesn't exist and can't be created?

-- OlivierRaginel - 24 Mar 2009

Woops, you're right. My foswiki is running in a chroot without /dev/null... I created /dev/null and now it seems to work.

But do you really need /dev/null? All other webapps I use here, don't rely on /dev/null.. Maybe you should think about it, so I changed priority to enhancement.

-- FiSh - 25 Mar 2009

No longer uses /dev/null since 1.1

-- CrawfordCurrie - 26 Aug 2010