MiniVend is not guaranteed to be supported in any fashion other than to make full source code of the current version available. However, the author is interested in making MiniVend as reliable and trouble-free as possible. Forward bug reports, questions and comments to the mail list, minivend-users@minivend.com.
MiniVend is powerful and correspondingly complex. If you are looking to ``point-and-click'' your way to a catalog, you probably should look elsewhere. While MiniMate can make administration easier, you should not expect to put up a catalog with no effort.
Do understand that any problems answered in this FAQ or the documentation will likely be ignored. Other problems will also be ignored if you don't:
mention that you have referenced appropriate items in the documentation and FAQ.
include the various version information that is appropriate.
mention what is (or is not) in the error.log files
The official MiniVend web site is:
http://www.minivend.com/
The latest version of the software, this FAQ, and the documentation, are available there. Your problem may not be unique -- check the site first. There is a search feature that encompasses the documentation and FAQ; there is also a mail list and an archive for it.
The most common problem on UNIX is receiving the ``We're sorry, the MiniVend server is unavailable...'' message. This almost always means that permissions are not properly set up, or that the link program is not in the right location.
If your provider uses CGI-WRAP or SUEXEC, it will probably error out if you selected UNIX mode and didn't reply ``Yes'' to the question Do you use CGIWRAP?. To unset the setuid bit for another try, telnet in and do
chmod u-s cgi-bin/simple
where cgi-bin is the directory that the program is located.
To reenable it:
chmod u-s cgi-bin/simple
If that doesn't work, it usually means you are on a virtual host with limited command set.
To verify that this is the problem, try temporarily changing the permission
of the MINIVEND_ROOT/etc/socket file to be read/write by setting in minivend.cfg:
SocketPerms 0666
If MiniVend then works you will have to make sure the user that the
VLINK program runs as matches the user who is running
the MiniVend daemon. It is usual to create a special mvend or minivend user to run the daemon and the link program. This means the directory listing for your
CGI-BIN should be something like:
-rwsr-xr-x 1 minivend users 6312 Dec 30 11:39 cgi-bin/simple
and for the socket file it should be:
srw------- 1 minivend users 0 Dec 30 11:41 etc/socket
See the next section for troubles with running MiniVend on ISP sites.
Beyond that, if you are unable to get MiniVend installed you should check
to see if you can run any
CGI program from the path it is trying to use. The
next most common problem is the user giving the wrong information to makecat.
MiniVend is intended to work on Perl Version 5.005 and higher, but the author does not have the resources (read time) to regression test all versions with the different versions of Perl, nor the differing operating systems that exist. MiniVend will definitely be tested with the last major release of Perl at the time of package release. As of this writing, MiniVend's version is 4.0 and Perl's latest release version is 5.005_03.
Please understand that the first remedy in the case of unknown problems will be to upgrade Perl to the latest version.