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-