My first thought is that you are seriously confused, but let's break your problem down a bit.

You say you want to restrict "access" to people who are "connected" to the server [by win32 network shares?], and that you want pages and script [results] to stay inside [your intranet?] rather than going out on the net [the network outside of your intranet?].

From what you write, is it safe to assume you're using IIS under NT/Win2K/XP Pro in a configuration that's exposed to your intranet? Or you on an intranet-only configuration, and want to further restrict access to those who can authenticate to your server?

Please fill in the pieces, and we'll see where this goes.

But I might be able to shed some light on why your pages are no longer working when expected. When you change a link in your pages to

\\servername\please\execute\this.pl

I assume you want this URL to point to a file on the local system (the URL is broken BTW, you just are lucky most browsers are smart enough to work around the brokenness).

Upon encountering this URL, the browser will happily go and read the file but become hopelessly confused as to what it's actually reading, because you're not feeding it HTML but Perl, and Perl will certainly confuse your average browser.

To summarise your problem: you seem to be bypassing the webserver and instructing the browser go get the file locally. This will not lead to the expected result.

If you want to restrict access to your web pages and scripts, you should be looking at the configuration of your web server, not at your pages and scripts.

Then again, I could be misreading your question entirely in which case the above is as useful as trying to teach a camel to tapdance. Except that a tapdancing camel might actually be funny.

CU
Robartes-

Well, if you want, you could write the absolute path simply to "/cgi-bin/test.pl" instead of including the hostname. Then near the top of your script, you could do something like

unless ( $ENV{HTTP_HOST} =~ /desired_host_name/ ){
  # print content-type header if needed
  # along with error message, or just exit;
}
[download]

So if the script isn't being called "locally" like "http://servername/cgi-bin/test.pl" (and you're testing for "servername"), it will just exit quietly, or perhaps you could spew an error message.

I can't speak to the relative security of this method (can it be spoofed?), and don't know if you have access to that environment variable, but it's worth a shot.