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If you are having problems

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.

Do understand that any problems answered in this FAQ or the documentation may be ignored if you don't:

The official MiniVend web site is:

    http://www.minivend.com/minivend/

The latest version of the software, this FAQ, and the documentation, are available there. Your problem may not be unique -- check the site first.

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 VLINK program is not setuid (this means that a program runs as a possibly different user ID, and is enabled with the UNIX command ``chmod u+s < file>''). Try temporarily changing the permission of the MINIVEND_ROOT/etc/socket file to be read/write to all groups (chmod 666 etc/socket). 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.

The most common problem on Windows is receiving ``Bad command or file name'' when trying to run the self-extracting ZIP installation. This means that Perl 5.004 is not installed on your machine or is not in your path. You must properly install Perl 5.004 before extracting.

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 5.004 and higher, but the author does not have the resources (read time) to regression test all versions with the different versions of Perl. 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 3.12 and Perl's latest version is 5.005_02.

Please understand that the first remedy in the case of unknown problems will be to upgrade Perl to the latest version.


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