Installing and Using Revolution as a CGI on Tierra.Net (was Dreamhost)

[Richard Gaskin]

Good stuff, Phil.

Phil's instructions for DreamHost are similar to what you'd need for 
Tierra.Net, which offers similarly priced packages.

Tierra.Net maintains a server farm preconfigured for use with the 
Revolution engine (ask for "server farm 2").

Tierra.Net runs BSD, so you'd need the BSD engine:
<http://downloads.runrev.com/revolution/engines/2.2.1/Bsd.gz>

You can decompress .gz files with Rev's decompress command.  I have a 
gZipper utility in RevNet (see Tools->Plugins->GoRevNet).

After you decompress the engine, just upload it to the cgi-bin folder 
and set the permissions to 755 as you would for any executable.

Once it's in place you can test it with this simple script -- put this 
in a text file named "test.mt" into your cgi-bin:

    #!/usr/home/fourthworld.net/htdocs/cgi-bin/mc
    on startup
        put "Content-Type: text/html" & crlf &\
              "Content-Length:"&& length("Hello") & crlf & crlf
        put "Hello"
    end startup


Upload the script and set the permissions for test.mt to 755.

Then call it from your browser:

    http://<domain>/cgi-bin/test.mt

You'll see the world "Hello" returned -- and that means you're in business!

I've been using Tierra.Net for about five years now ever since a client 
turned me on the them.  In addition to the fastest FTP handshake I've 
seen yet they also have an unusually sound business model which offers 
the support benefits of a small company but all of the solid 
infrastructure of the biggest hosting firms (multiple redundant T3s, 
on-site generator, nightly backup, 24/7 support, convenient control 
panel, etc.).

The support team was very amendable to setting up their servers for Rev 
use, and the dozen or so domains I have there (including revJournal.com) 
have been running smoothly since I started.


For some great info on CGI use, Jacque maintains an excellent 
introductory tutorial on using Rev as a CGI at:
<http://hyperactivesw.com/cgitutorial/index.html>

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com