Need advice porting CGI::IRC app to NT4 server

[alex67501]

The question has probably already been asked, but the forum seems to be rather long, so please don't just RTFM. Don't answer if you don't want to help me.

I have virtually no knowledge in Perl/CGI and am in some sort of trouble.

I have this CGI:IRC (0.5.4) script, which is a great one and does exactly what i want it to do on my FreeBSD server. But the person I work for needs it to work on it's win NT4 web server, and it won't work. After quite a number of days spent on google, I figured out it opened unix domain sockets, and that it is impossible to do that under win32. I tried fixing it by just changing UNIX by INET when opening the sockets like I had already done it on other scripts, but it didn't work.

Can you help? (either by "simulating" unix domain sockets under windows, or by finding a win32 version of it)

Cheers

[Vautrin]

I have virtually no knowledge in Perl/CGI and am in some sort of trouble... I figured out it opened unix domain sockets, and that it is impossible to do that under win32.

There are ways to get around not having Unix domain sockets but if you don't know any Perl this will be a problem, because it is unlikely you will be able to do a simple search and replace. Although Perl was designed to be a cross platform language, the large variations between operating systems makes it very easy to prevent your script from working on multiple OSes. If the script was written for Unix or Unix like systems only, chances are a good chunk of the code needs to be rewritten to take into account NT 4's foibles. This may include more then changing the mode of Interprocess communication to use something other then Unix domain sockets (Hint: try TCP/IP, which should work under Windows because it is cross platform)

So, the best suggestion I have for you is either find an Open Source project that does what you want to do and supports Windows, or hire a programmer to convert your script to work on NT for you.

Hope that helps,

Vautrin

[iburrell]

Did you ask the author of the script? CGI:IRC has a website http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/. They even have a FAQ about running under Windows:

"It hasn't been designed to work on windows natively (eg: ActivePerl with IIS or Apache) due to use of unix domain sockets. Running apache and perl under the environment provided by cygwin is reported to work. This is only required of the server - nearly any web browser on nearly operating system should work as a client."

It is possible to change from Unix domain sockets to TCP sockets. Depending on the complexity of the software, it could be a lot of work.