On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:32:54 +1100, Doug Laidlaw wrote:

> I am trying to get working a calendar program I have used in the past, on a
> new Mandriva 2008 installation. It opens O.K. in Apache as HTML, but if I
> specify Postscript output, it tries to download the cgi file.

What specifically is "it"? Your browser? What is Apache sending as
headers? Did you setup Apache to send the application/postscript type
headers? If it does, then Apache is done with its job. If it's not, then
you should add it.

For 2.2.6, that's in mime_module, make sure
TypesConfig /etc/apache2/mime.types

is set, which contains

application/postscript eps ps

on my system. Old Apache is likely the same or similar.


> After a bit
> of hunting around, I installed gv to handle the Postscript, but no luck.

In Firefox, it will likely say "file xyz is of type application/postcript
.... what should Firefox do with this file?" The first time you encounter
it. You app needs to respect /etc/mailcap and do what is in there. Not all
do, but I believe this is the convention. (man mailcap)


> Perhaps I still need to set up the machinery to handle
> Application/Postscript?

Well, the config files...

>
> There are no clues in Apache's access_log or errors_log.

Use something like curl to see what's being sent:

curl -v http://your.host/file.ps

and look at the headers for the mime type. Example:

[ jayjwa@vdrl:~>] cd public_html/
[ jayjwa@vdrl:~/public_html>] nano test.txt
[ jayjwa@vdrl:~/public_html>] cat test.txt | mps > test.ps
[ jayjwa@vdrl:~/public_html>] file test.ps
test.ps: PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0
[ jayjwa@vdrl:~/public_html>] curl -v https://vdrl.ath.cx/~jayjwa/test.ps
* About to connect() to vdrl.ath.cx port 443 (#0)
* Trying 192.168.10.76... connected
* Connected to vdrl.ath.cx (192.168.10.76) port 443 (#0)
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET /~jayjwa/test.ps HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.17.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.17.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3 c-ares/1.4.0 libidn/1.2 libssh2/0.17
> Host: vdrl.ath.cx
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:18:59 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g DAV/2 PHP/5.2.4
< Last-Modified: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:18:23 GMT
< ETag: "7fe2a-33a-e36ee9c0"
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Length: 826
< Content-Type: application/postscript
<
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Creator: mps v2.1.0 Copyright (C) 1999, Richard R. Urena. All rights reserved.
%%CreationDate: Sun Nov 11 09:18:23 2007

%%DocumentFonts: Courier
%%LanguageLevel: 1
%%Orientation: Portrait
%%Pages: (atend)
%%PageOrder: Ascend
%%EndComments

%BeginProlog
/S {moveto show} bind def
/P {showpage} bind def
%EndProlog

%%BeginSetup
% Change the encoding vector to Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
/Courier findfont
dup length dict begin
{1 index /FID ne {def} {pop pop} ifelse} forall
/Encoding ISOLatin1Encoding def
currentdict
end
/Courier-ISOLatin1 exch definefont pop
% Scale to the desired size
/Courier-ISOLatin1 findfont 10 scalefont setfont
%%EndSetup

% ------ begin file: (stdin) ------ %

%%Page: 1
(Hey, this is a postscript test! OK.) 72.0 714.9 S
(All done now.) 72.0 690.9 S
P

%%Trailer
%%Pages: 1
%%EOF
* Connection #0 to host vdrl.ath.cx left intact
* Closing connection #0
* SSLv3, TLS alert, Client hello (1):



CGI's (should) specify
the mime type in their headers. If not, Apache will guess, and it could
guess wrong. After that, you need an app that will respect mailcap, or
provide the same functionality. Be careful with auto-processing
Postscript. I've been told it can exec commands (security concerns), but
haven't actually seen a real attack using it.

In /etc/mailcap,

# Postscript
application/postscript; \
gv %s; \
test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; \
description=postscript document


using FF to access the same URL, it pops up a box with the "What should
Firefox ..." dialog with the default set to 'gv'. Hitting return displays
the test document in gv. I'm not sure about other apps respecting
/etc/mailcap.



--
[** America, the police state **]
Whoooose! What's that noise? Why, it's US citizen's
rights, going down the toilet with Bush flushing.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...007/08/wiretap
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