[MacPerl-WebCGI] Re: macperl-webcgi-digest V1 #154

[Joel Rees <joel_rees@sannet.ne.jp>]

>Apart from the above ould you or anyone else give a bit more attention to
>- - What use is closing a file as soon as possible after opening, if only 
>flock-ing gives a measure of protection?

Well, it happens to be a good general practice for several reasons:

     server might go down suddenly
          (closed files tend to get damaged less),
     it reduces the amount of negotiating for resources
          also reduces the possibility of resource request deadlock,
     it tends to help push code towards modularization

among other reasons.

There are counter issues, like closing early or repeatedly will push 
performance down in many algorithms, also you may not want to close a 
file in the middle of a logical transaction, even a transaction which 
doesn't need to be locked.

>- - Unix has three groups for which permissions may be set. Is a file 
>created by a CGI ruled by a fourth group?

You do tend to get this impression, don't you. (I wondered at first.) The 
"fourth group" is not in the UNIX file system. The server software 
augments and extends the system supported file permissions in an effort 
to provide both access and protection. I think I already mentioned 
Apache's global service settings and per-directory .htaccess files in a 
previous post. 

What I did to try to figure this business out was to set up netpresenz on 
a Mac and read everything I could in the netpresenz docs, and 
experimented a little. (I don't remember how I did it, but I quickly had 
Perl running the netpresenz CGIs.) Then I got hold of an old Power Mac 
7100 and loaded MkLinux on it with all services enabled, hooked up a few 
other machines (notebooks) in a small _closed_ network. The web server, 
Apache, has pretty good on-line documentation, which you can easily read 
with your web browser on one of the client machines.

I have to be careful about the experimenting, because the boss thinks I'm 
having too much fun at it.

Joel Rees
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