Upgrade notes for http://web-docs.gsi.de

As of 2020-11-11 http://web-docs.gsi.de has been migrated to a new hardware and upgraded to a newer operating system release.

Due to the upgrade some operation policies have changed.

DMZ/Firewall

The web-docs server has been relocated to a DMZ network, therefore connections from web-docs.gsi.de to the internal networks as well as the internet are guarded by the central GSI firewall. Access to internal network resources from web-docs.gsi.de may therefore be restricted. You may apply for additional firewall rules that allow connections to these resources by email to mailto:web-docs-service@gsi.de

UTF-8

The default character encoding of the old server was Latin-1, on the new server it is UTF-8. You may have to convert your content (eg. recode ISO8859-1..utf-8 file) or indicate the correct encoding in your HTML code (<meta charset="ISO-8859-1">).

Perl

The current directory . is no longer included in the search path for Perl modules (@INC), see https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/perldelta.pod#Removal-of-the-current-directory-(%22.%22)-from-@INC. Perl CGI scripts that rely on loading Perl modules residing in the same directory will fail.

As an alternative the directory ~/web-docs/site_perl/ will automatically be added to @INC if it exists. You can put your Perl modules there.

If you absolutely need to load Perl modules from the same directory your scripts are running in, and you are sure that you fully understood the rationale behind CVE-2016-1238, and you are sure that it is not exploitable in your scenario, you may also circumvent this issue by adding the following code to your Perl scripts:

use lib '.';

Authorization control and mod_auth…

The format of authorization configuration has changed. These directives no longer work:

Order allow,deny # or Order deny,allow
Allow from .gsi.de
Deny from all

The new syntax is Require … as documented here eg. Require host gsi.de.
See the official Apache upgrade documentation for more information.