[texhax] Running LaTeX on shared GoDaddy hosting

[Ryan Landay]

I have a GoDaddy shared webhosting account with a texlive installation
(someone else installed it onto a flash drive and then uploaded it).
When I try to run pdflatex and route stderr to a file, I get the
message:

(null): fatal: Can't get long name for D:\Hosting.
.

Is this related to the texmf.cnf configuration? I tried changing some
of the file paths but it’s still having the same problem. I also tried
running pdflatex from a copy of MiKTeX Portable and got this message:

pdflatex.exe: A required file system path could not be retrieved.
pdflatex.exe: Data: 28

I tried a couple of other utilities from each distribution (dvi2ps and
latex) and they both have the same problem. Is this a permissions
problem with the way GoDaddy is mapping the shared directory? If so,
is there anything we can do about it? I’m not really sure we’re
supposed to be running executables in GoDaddy’s shared hosting space,
but we already got latex2rtf working.