Another Newbie TeX Filter problem

Another Newbie TeX Filter problem

by Darrel Branson -
Number of replies: 3

Hello All,

I've had a look through the forums but can't seem to find a fix to my problem. We are running Moodle 1.3 on Windows 2003 Server with PHP 4.3.

We are having problems with the Tex Filters. The Tex Debug page gives the following error

=====================
Access is denied.
The shell command
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot/filter/tex/mimetex.exe ++ -e "C:\Inetpub\moodle_uploads/filter/tex/74c2b66b2d2501b77fad711fd1febcf0.gif" "\Large f(x)=\Bigint_{-\infty}^x~e^{-t^2}dt"
returned status = 1
File size of mimetex executable C:\Inetpub\wwwroot/filter/tex/mimetex.exe is 329728
The file permissions are: 100777
The md5 checksum of the file is 22ab85e080b00852d238074a9cf5f10d
Image not found!
========================

The directory permissions are set as writable by all (including the webserver process). Those directories do exist but I'm concerned if the syntax should actually mix forward and backward slashes.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards
Darrel

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In reply to Darrel Branson

Re: Another Newbie TeX Filter problem

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
If you are using IIS as your web server, take a look at this discussion: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6446#30895
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In reply to Zbigniew Fiedorowicz

Re: Another Newbie TeX Filter problem

by Darrel Branson -

Thanks for the tip but unfortunately it didn't solve our problem. We are still getting errors as mentioned above.

If I execute the binary from the command line it spits out GiF ascii gibberish so I presume it will work. I wonder if anyone can tell me how those foward & back slashes get mixed up in the path name??? Is this normal???

Any, any ideas would be appreciated smile

Cheers
Darrel

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In reply to Darrel Branson

Re: Another Newbie TeX Filter problem

by Mark Hughes -

The good news is that Zig (the first fella who answered your question) is the author of this particular part of Moodle.  So you're in good hands -- if he can't answer it, there's a good chance you're not going to find anyone who can -- but still though, email the guys with the similar problem...maybe they're just not following the thread anymore.

Toss up the link to your site when you get a chance...also bump the permissions down from 0777 to 0775...I'm not at all certain, but I wondering if IIS is denying access because anyone can execute the script....it might see that as a security hole.

As for the forwardslash/ backslash\ thing -- that could be a problem I suppose -- I haven't looked at the texfilter and pix.php code in a while, but last I can remember, if you want to change that, you'll have to hard code it -- not an easy task  Good luck with the permissions on that file!

Mark

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