I am trying to install FosWiki on a hosted Linux environment.

I do not have root privileges on this environement and very limited rights (I cannot change any of the installed programs system configuration files).

I have the following error with configure script:

System temporary directory

Error: Cannot open '/tmp' for read (Permission denied) - check that permissions are correct.

I tried to change my .profile and .bash_profile to add a TMPDIR variable, but (as I expected) this does not work.

Is there a way to setup /tmp directory using Perl configuration files or otherwise ? Or is this hopeless ?

System is derived from GNU/Linux Debian with several modifications from my hoster. Result of uname -a:

Linux ssh1.media.ha.ovh.net 3.2.2-xxxx-std-ipv6-64 #2 SMP Tue Mar 6 07:25:43 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Thanks in advance

-- LauHub - 01 Feb 2013

EDIT:

I found a workaround for this, but I am not sure it is safe nor secure.

I first changed the shebang to use the following ones:

• #!/usr/bin/env /my/own/perlWT

for all the files with a shebang ending with 'perl -wT'

The content of /my/own/perlWT is :

#!/bin/bash
export TMPDIR=/homez.577/aeziobog/tmp
/usr/local/bin/perl -wT $*

• #!/usr/bin/env /my/own/perlW

for all the files with a shebang ending with 'perl -w'

The content of /my/own/perlW is :

#!/bin/bash
export TMPDIR=/homez.577/aeziobog/tmp
/usr/local/bin/perl -w $*

• #!/usr/bin/env perl

for all the files with a shebang ending with 'perl'

Because the taint option made the tmpdir not correctly found, I finally removed it from the perlWT script.

Is this correct ?

-- LauHub - 04 Feb 2013

Yes it appears that this will work. On 1.1.x it's probably the best you can do. Taint checking, while an important security feature, more often finds issues during development. If you stick with the core extensions, then exposures that would be found by the -T option are hopefully already found and fixed.

Foswiki 2.0 will address this differently by adding a configuration parameter to specify the temporary directory, and setting an un-tainted environment variable during initialization for use by Foswiki. You can see some of the upcoming 1.2 changes here: http://trac.foswiki.org/browser/trunk/core/lib/Foswiki.pm#L1675

-- GeorgeClark - 04 Feb 2013