Information Needed for Support

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## Information Needed for Support

First, check the the official MiniVend web site for information:

        http://www.minivend.com/

If you are unable to get MiniVend installed, it is almost always a problem with your answers to its questions or with the the Perl installation. Common problems include:

- Your Perl has threading enabled. This may cause problems for MiniVend on some operating systems. Try building a Perl without threading.

- Occupied default port (8786) or interfering firewall during the test. This causes part of 'make test' to fail while MiniVend might still work just fine.

- Very old machine or a machine with very low memory (less than 64M). The test programs might time out while MiniVend might still work. It won't work very well; expect very slow performance if you don't have sufficient memory.

- Bad installation of Perl. While not as common as it used to be, since Perl 5 is distributed with so many systems, it does happen. A proper Perl will need to be installed.

  If MiniVend does a core dump or causes a segmentation fault, this is most certainly the problem.

- Inadequate system privileges or quota restrictions. If you have a virtual memory quota then MiniVend can easily exceed it.

- HPUX may not be able to compile vlink.c and tlink.c. Use tlink.pl as your link program. In addition, Solaris often comes with either no tools or your path may not point to /usr/ccs/bin where some of the tools are.

There are many more possible problems. See the README file for other OS-specific problems.

Second, double check that you have done the following things:

- Checked all of the error.log files? There is one for each catalog, and a global one in the MiniVend software root directory.

- Try INET mode if UNIX mode fails, and vice-versa.

- If you run CGI-WRAP or SUEXEC, have you turned off the SUID bit for vlink with a `chmod 755 cgi-bin/simple` or the like? (The `makecat` program does this if you answer its question correctly.)

- Have you tried copying the INET mode link program `tlink` over the `/cgi-bin/simple` or `simple.cgi` program?

- That you have proper permissions on all files that need to be written. This includes the product database ASCII source files, needed because of locking.

- If the function in question is from an external program (such as PGP) you have tried the command as shown in the directive from the command line, and as the same user ID as the minivend daemon.

- The vlink CGI program is being executed on a machine that has the socket file etc/socket on a directly attached disk. UNIX-domain sockets will not work on NFS-mounted filesystems! That means the server minivend.pl and the CGI program vlink must be executing on the same machine. In most cases, you can use INET mode and the tlink program instead if you must cross NFS boundaries.

If you have a problem you are not able to correct, and you have taken all of those steps, you can send email to the MiniVend users list:

        minivend-users@minivend.com

Please include your operating system name and version, your Perl version, the DBM library in use, and the contents of ALL error logs.

Please see this if you don't get an answer:

        http://www.minivend.com/minivend/the_authors_life.txt

MiniVend is an ambitious and complex program, and is not presented as being easy to use, easy to install, or bug-free. The configuration script was done to try and make a very painful process only slightly painful. Some people install in one pass. Others never make it. Determined and thoughtful users almost always make MiniVend work.

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