Error -- the MiniVend server was not running...

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## Error -- the MiniVend server was not running...

This indicates that the link CGI is not communicating with the MiniVend server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The server should always be started by the same user ID which owns the suid vlink program. (This does not apply to TLINK/INET mode.)

The server must be running, first of all. If you didn't start it, you can do so by going to the MiniVend home directory and typing:

        bin/start

You can check to see if your server is running by typing:

        Linux, SunOS, BSD:    ps -ax | grep minivend
        Most other systems:   ps -elf | grep minivend

Note: Solaris and IRIX truncate the string, and doesn't allow setting of the `$0` parameter. You may have to grep for 'perl' instead.

If the server is not running, it may have failed due to another process occupying the TCP socket 7786. If using VLINK, you may start MiniVend with `start -u`, which will not monitor the internet-domain socket.

If VLINK is not communicating with the server, there are a number of possible reasons. First, if you are trying to run MiniVend on an ISP, go to the section about ISP problems -- it is probably one of those. If you are running MiniVend on a single machine, it is probably one of:

        1. Permissions problems
        2. MiniVend on NFS-mounted file system

Permissions are easy. If you for some reason can't run VLINK as an SUID program (SUID to your user ID, not to root), then you will need to make permissions more permissive. See the MiniVend documentation for how to use the ReadPermission and WritePermission directives to make the session files and sockets 'group' or 'world' readable and writable. If you can make your UID, or the one you have chosen to own MiniVend, the same group as your HTTP user, then you can make the files group read-write. If you can't, you will have to set the dreaded 'world' permissions.

If you are running MiniVend on an NFS-mounted file system it cannot run in server mode, because UNIX-domain sockets don't work on NFS. You will need to change to static mode from server mode, or better yet, put MiniVend on a file system that is directly mounted.

As of MiniVend 2.03, you can use MiniVend in INET mode along with the tlink.c program to allow running across NFS boundaries. If you have not changed the configured defaults, and still it will not communicate, you should try setting the LINK_HOST and LINK_PORT directives in tlink.c and recompiling. <hr>

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