Plesk 8.6 cgi-bin trouble

I recently worked on a project to quickly create a simple cgi-bin script to capture some data from a form on a mostly static website. The script was simple, take the data from the form, and send it via email. The script was written by a co-worker of mine using python. When we went to deploy the script on the server with Plesk 8.6, it was nothing but a pain in the butt.. I have documented some of the things we did below in order to get it working.

Here are the errors that we were getting during the process in no particular order.

• "target uid/gid (10001/2524 or 2523) mismatch with directory (10001/2524) or program (48/48)"
• "uid: (10001/cashstarftp) gid: (2524/2524) cmd: mail_script.cgi"
• "cannot get docroot information (/var/www/vhosts)"
• "failed to open log file /var/log/httpd/suexec_log"
• "Premature end of script headers: mail_script.py"

Here are the different steps that we did to resolve the different errors:

SSH in and type the following: "chown root:apache /usr/sbin/suexec"

My permissions were also wrong for the following

/var/log/httpd, should be drwx------ root root

/var/log/httpd/suexec_log, should be -rw-r--r-- root root

/home/httpd/vhosts/your-domain-name.com/statistics, should be dr-xr-x--- root psaserv

/home/httpd/vhosts/your-domain-name.com/cgi-bin should be, drwxr-x--x ftpuser psaserv

As most of you know but just in case scripts in the cgi-bin directory need to be -rwxr-xr-x ftpuser psacln

Replace "ftpuser" with the ftp user name for that domain

And don't forget to restart Apache after making these changes.

There are probably more things that we ended up trying that I didn't document here, so feel free to post how you fixed your issue, so that others can benefit.