Question

I am trying to get TWiki installed at my company. I have a short window of time to get people to start using it. Unfortunately, I get a "Premature end of script headers" error in the Web server log file when I try to register. View seems to work fine, but I cannot edit due to not being able to register. Interestingly, it was hard to get registered on this TWiki as well...(maybe a proxy problem?)

I have tried removing Perl command line arguments from register.pl but that seems fruitless. Another symptom: I also noticed that after getting registered on this TWiki (not sure how I got it to work...back button was involved), the user information must have stuck in my browser, because I could edit my local TWiki. I am not using authentication as far as I know.

I am trying to change a culture here and I can't even get the server running (ugh). Any help would be great.

• TWiki version: 20001201
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: NT

-- TWikiGuest - 17 May 2001

Answer

There is a known AuthenticatedRegistrationBug, probably what you experienced on this server.

The "Premature end of script headers" error in the access log indicates that Perl could not compile the script due to some syntax error, i.e. a missing library. Check the Apache error log, or enable error messages on the browser: Place a use CGI::Carp qw( fatalsToBrowser ); just before the use CGI; statement in your scripts.

-- PeterThoeny - 18 May 2001

Thanks for the quick response. A couple things:

1. using CGI::Carp didn't do anything (the error was too low-level?)
2. turns out that (walking print statement through the code) the program gives the script headers error when email isn't set up. The code looks as if it should continue gracefully when the exec fails, but it does not.

Suggest looking into this or requiring email to be set up in documentation. So, didn't fix the problem, but found it.

-- ChristianHall - 21 May 2001

Comment 9-22-2005

I ran into this identical error message when I reinstalled a Twiki after a system crash and people started to try to register again. The system we were on (Fedora core 4) had sendmail installed but not configured. Getting sendmail configured eliminated this problem.

I will note that if you get this fixed fast enough the "failed" mails will go through but the registration has already failed.

-- DavidMyers - 22 Sep 2005