[Xitami] pipes0000.flt

[Thomas J. Hruska]

At 10:54 AM 11/22/2004 -0500, Ron Ackerman writeth:
>I have Xitami running on a win2kpro pc, and recently I discoverd thousands
of pipexxxx.flt files in my temp directory. Basically 1 file for each page
visited. It appears to only happen with PHP pages and not HTML pages. Here
is what I have ruled out.
>  
>I haver ruled out
>html pages
>cookies
>MySQL
>anything in domain.cfg
>I didn't see anything in the php.ini
>  
>I creates a incremental file for each page visited. 
>  
>So does Xitami have anything to do with creating a temp file called
pipe0001.flt   that's FLT. Which looks to me to be a filter file.
>At the moment I have created a batch file to delete *.flt but I would
rather whatever creates it to either not create it or remove it when it's
done. 
>  
>Thanks
>Ron

Yes.  Xitami uses a temporary file for the output from PHP or any other
filter application (Nuclear Vision, Perl, ColdFusion, counter programs,
etc.).  Here is how it works behind the scenes:

1)  Create a new temporary file with a FLT extension (flt = filter - you
should be able to see the relationship between the INI configuration
section called [filters] and the file extension FLT).
2)  If it is a POST request, create another temporary file that contains
the POST request data.
3)  Start the application (e.g. php.exe) with output piped to the temporary
file (and an optional input file pipe).
4)  Wait for the application to finish.  If it times out, it may not get to
the next two steps.
5)  Open the file and dump the contents to the web client (e.g. IE,
Mozilla, Firefox).
6)  Once the dump is complete, close the file and delete it.

It is possible to get FLT files to stick around beyond their appropriate
lifetime by writing scripts that timeout or during a DoS of the CGI filters
(just sending 60 requests per second or so might be able to do that -
Xitami gets "confused" with that rate of page requests).  They could be a
security risk for SSL-enabled connections if you display the credit card
information back to the user and other people have access to the system as
the information will be saved to the hard drive temporarily.  This isn't
meant to scare you - I'm just providing a few friendly heads-up tips.


Thomas J. Hruska
Shining Light Productions
http://www.slproweb.com/