Problems & Solutions

I got an error of "HTTP error 500", why?
Check this list of possible problems, the one you encountered must be one of them:
1. You are using POD for Windows on POD for Unix, or vise versa. Solution: Download the correct version of POD on web sites listed in Download .
2. Your server disallows user to run binary cgi scripts. Your server may allow perl scripts but not allow binary (compiled) cgi scripts. Read Win32 or Unix in Requirements for more. Solution: You have to change a web hosting company if this is the case and you really want to run POD.
3. Some web servers only allow running binary scripts named "xxx.cgi" (servers like Apache and most other servers allow you to set the extensions that can work as cgi scripts. A popular setting for binary scripts is .cgi on Unix and .exe on Win32). Solution: Rename "fldb.exe" and "fldbconf.exe" to "fldb.cgi" and "fldbconf.cgi" respectively.
4. If you are using POD for Win32, your server might be lacking necessary dynamically linked library (dll) files that POD requires. Read Win32 in Requirements for more. Solution is listed there. A hint on how to diagnose this problem: Ask your web server administrator to launch POD through command line (MS DOS), if it complains some dll is missing, then it is the problem. Otherwise, POD will cause an "illegal operation" fault and shut down (because POD is a cgi program, so it is not supposed to be launched through command line. But if you do it, it's usually not going to cause any problem. Warranty on this is not provided though!)
5. If you are using POD for Unix, dynamically linked (shared library) version, your server might lack the gcc 3.0 shared library files that POD requires. Read Unix in Requirements for more. Solution is listed there. A hint on how to diagnose this problem: Ask your web server administrator to launch POD through command line, if it complains some .so is missing, then it is the problem. Otherwise, POD will cause a core dump and shut down (because POD is a cgi program, so it is not supposed to be launched through command line. But if you do it, it's usually not going to cause any problem. Warranty on this is not provided though!)
6. If you are using POD for Win32, your server administrator might not have set file permissions right. Solution: Ask your server administrator to set these permissions on your cgi-bin directory and its subdirectories: Set NTFS to "read" and "write", and set IIS to disable "read" and "write" but allow "execute". For more instructions, read http://rr.sans.org/web/sec_IIS.php (this web site is not affiliated with POD and has nothing to do with POD! The info it provides could help your server administrator though).
7. If you are using POD for Unix, you might not have set the file permissions right. You should set access mode on your cgi-bin directory and subdirectories to be 711, while setting all non-executable files under cgi-bin and its subdirectories to be 0700 if possible. Please read Unix in Security section for more.
8. On Unix, file names are case-sensitive. Solution: Check the case for the names and make changes when necessary

I got an error of "HTTP error 405", why?
See here .

I got CGI Error, "the specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:", why?
See here .

I got a "page cannot be displayed" error or "the cgi script returned an empty set of tags" error, why?
See here.

I got an error mesg: "
Method Not Allowed
The requested method POST is not allowed for the URL /db/cgi-bin/fldb.exe". Why?
See here.

Every time I enter something into forms and press submit button, POD complains that the ini file not found even though I'm sure the path was right.
If you're sure that you set DBName and path of files right, then the problem must be due to incorrect permission setting. There are two possibilities:
1. If you are using POD for Win32 and selected "hide file=1" or checked the "hide files" checkbox during your online configuration, it is possible that your WinNT/2000 server forbids cgi programs to read hidden files, then POD can't find the files including the ini or DB file itself. Solution: set "hide file=0" or uncheck the "hide files" checkbox during your online configuration.
2. If that does not work, try see option No.6 (for Win32) or No.7 (for Unix) in here

I launch POD, it always tells me DB file locked but not initiation file locked.
See here .

After I filled data into the html forms and pressed the submit button, nothing happened!
Most likely you used an old version Microsoft Frontpage to edit your html file. Microsoft Frontpage tends to modify html form tags to its liking, and it sometimes messes up the tags. Try to use another html editor to modify the html files and see if same problem happens again.

It seems the database program only collected part of the html form data, but not the rest?
Please check the spelling you used in the <Input type="text" name="xxx"> tag. The "xxx" must be exactly the same (preferrably the same case too) as the DB entry item name you specified in DB configurations.

DB gave me strange error reports.
Please check the spelling you used in your html form tags and/or the POD-specific tags. You should use exactly the same spelling AND case as those in the sample and template files! Also if POD complains that it cannot find .ini initiation file, check the access rights of your cgi-bin directory as described here .

I input time stamp and numbers, but somehow they are not sorted correctly?
Likely the time stamp you input is not in the right format, too old or too much into the future, or the number you input is too big (more than 9 digits). In those cases, these items will not be sorted correctly, and DB may even record wrong data if the number is too big.

I have used my language to write all the html interface files, yet I still see some English words on my pages, e.g., the page links "prev" and "next" are in English, not my language, why?
There are two possible reasons for this: 1. Please read List of Files for help for using .lann file to customize page links and a few other small places that default to English. 2. Some rare errors of the DB are reported in English. If you had set up the DB correctly and your web server is set up right and functioning well, your user should almost never see those error messages. Please check your settings if you or your user do see such messages.

Somehow it seems that POD only recognized a few of the items I named for my entry items. Why is that?
Please note that you should always put one item name for each item in your DB entry, and you should always assign a size for each item. In addition, you should be consistent with the case of those names. You should NEVER leave any item name or size empty like this:"entry item name= name,,telephone,web site,image,status" in your .ini file. This will cause the "telephone,web site,image,status" items not read in by POD. In fact, make it a habbit not to write anything like "...,,..." unless instructed to do so because that will usually cause anything behind ",," be discarded by POD. You should at least write something like "...,a,..." to avoid losing data behind the second comma.

Why POD does not link to some of the pages correctly?
Check your spelling, syntax of POD-specific tags, or cases of POD-specific tags or file names.

I just uploaded all the files to my server and POD runs fine. However, I can't find my .ini and .txt files any more on my FTP server. Why is that?
It's likely that you set "hide files" to 1 instead of 0 in your .ini file or checked the "hide files" checkbox during your online configuration. It is always a good idea to set the "hide files" to 1 for security purposes. But on some FTP server, this will make the hidden files disappear. What you can do to make them reappear is simply set hide files to 0 or uncheck that check box. Next POD is run, it will set files not to be hidden and you will be able to see and update those files manually. However, I strongly encourage you to use DBAdmin.html to manipulate the .ini file online instead of directly modifying .ini file unless you have to. Also try not to manually change the DB file itself (the .txt file) which could introduce errors into the file and damage it. Always let POD modify your DB file for you.

I specified everything in the [report] section, yet I did not receive any statistics report or error report. Why?
There are 3 possibilities why this could happen: 1. You must have a hit counting item in your DB entries for POD to collect statistics and send them to you. 2. You must have a legitimate SMTP server AND your and/or your web server has the clearance to send e-mail through that SMTP server (for Win32 version), or a program named sendmail at /usr/sbin/ (for Unix version). Or else SMTP server authorization may fail and there is nothing POD can do. 3. You must set error report and stat report to "1" (check those boxed during online configuration) before POD starts to send report to you. In addition, if your DB is working perfectly and no error occurs, you will not receive any error report.

Why POD told me "you must register to run POD for more than one DB for more than 20 days" when it's still in trial period?
POD disallow user hampering with the file (edit, delete, rename or swap in one DB for another) in unregistered version. If you did any of that, you might get this warning even before end of trial period. In such event, you can contact mingyiliu@yahoo.com and I can start an empty new DB for you.

I think I did everything right and used only one DB, yet my DB named test that's put under my cgi-bin\test subdirectory generated an error message "You need to register to operate on more than one DB for more than 20 days". Why?
That is because you are using unregistered version of POD. You have to name your DB "fldb" and put DB files under cgi-bin\fldb subdirectories. Your unregistered version will only recognize the DB named "fldb".

I am using Sambar server. I get a message that ini file cannot be found. Why?
Sambar Server V4.3 or earlier for Windows has a problem with absolute file paths. I am contacting them to check it out. Regardless of their action, I figured out a way to get around it and the new POD version 5.02 works on Sambar server. In addition, you may want to follow the following instruction to set security on Sambar for POD DBs:
1.Launch the index.html under the docs subdirectory of the directory you installed Samba in.
2.Click on the "system administration" link. If this is your first time doing administration, type "admin" as user and leave the password blank. If you've done it before, use the user name and password you last used (or if you changed them, use the new ones).
3.Click on the icon next to "user management". Click on all the trashcan icons next to the user names that you want to delete (You should delete anonymous, guest users). Then you should create a user name yourself by clicking on "create user" link. The create user page will appear on right pane, and you can assign user name and password there (let's assume you made a user "myname". You should also click on "admin" user which belongs to group "root" and assign a password to it too.
4.Go back to administration page by pressing "back" button of your browser. This time click the icon next to "server configuration".
5.Scoll down the page until your find "Enforce .htaccess" on the left side of the page. Click on the "yes" radio button to enable .htaccess". Go to the bottom of the page and press "update server configuration" button.
6.Restart the Sambar server. Give it some time to come back on (it may take a few minutes). This step is required for the settings set above to take effect (this is unlike all other servers I have used, therefore I spent an hour trying desparately to figure out what I did wrong. They did not make it easy because their documentation on .htaccess did not mention restarting server, at least I did not see such notice until I went for "security overview").
7.Put fldb.exe, fldbconf.exe under the cgi-bin directory of Sambar4.3 server. Make a fldb subdirectory under cgi-bin and put these files under that subdirectory--fldb.ini, fldb.lann, notfound.html, opcomplete.html, pwd.html, multi-admin.html, multi-user.html, sing-user.html, sing-admin.html, infoneed.html. The fldb-search-user.html, fldb-search-admin.html, fldb-add.html files can be put anywhere under the server root directory.
8.Open notepad or any text editor, put these two lines in: AuthName "Authorized Only" require user myname
9.Now save this file as .htaccess under the fldb subdirectory. 10.Now your fldb subdirectory is protect and only the user "myname" can access files under fldb directory. So your DB settings and DB file itself are safe now!

SMTP is now supported in POD for Unix through sendmail program (must be under /usr/sbin/sendmail!) since version 5.26. POD will automatically search for sendmail in the future.

I found that I cannot customize the error message pages and a few other message pages is that right?
Yes. The reasoning behind it is that unless some serious error happened or you're the first visitor to the DB (which almost for sure means you're the administrator), you will not see those message pages. Therefore your user should not see those pages, why spend the effort to customize them? Of course, I'll try to find a way to allow customization of those pages if more users requrest this feature.

I need to let people add records to my database. How can I stop someone from using a script to add thousands of records?
The only way to stop them from doing that would be to add password protection to your site and only let those that know the password to add records. Or else there is no way that you allow some anonymous users to add records while disallowing others, regardless whether they use a script or web interface in the current POD (or any other DB) implementation. It is simply not possible with any software.