[Lvlug] The saga continues

[Daniel S. Washko]

Today marked a turning point for our department.  First, the ass-whoopin'. 
The web design class has been experiencing problems again with their
frontpage webs.  It was only a matter of time until this issue creept up on
our department again.  We had hoped, in vain, that the new Netware 5.1
server running Netscape Enterprise Server might support frontpage server
extensions.  But alas, it does not.  A nice little $150 support call to
Novell trying to figure out what this error meant, and what wonderful
companies product was responsible:

     disk access error:  server [full unc to server] is busy try saving later

I suspected it was fontpage extension related, but countless searches across
the web yeilded little information.  Finally, novell support confirmed it
was the case with frontpage server extensions.  Not only does 5.1 not
support fp extensions, but in Netware 6.x, not only dose Netscape Enterprise
server not support fpext, but neither does the Apache; and there are no
plans for support in the near future.  We were led to believe that Netware
6.0 would solve this problem for us.

Saddened, we were left with three choices:

   1)  Install an IIS server
   2)  Install a linux server
   3)  Offload our web server to the IU

Well, 1 was out of the question.  Need you ask why?  First off security,
second cost.

Option 2 was prickly, since I am the only one who is willing to support linux.

So, option 3 was choosen.  But, we have not advanced to far on this yet.

Well, driving home tonite, I figured what the hell.  I have a box, and some
discs, let's get the damn thing working.  So I did.  Now, I humbly regret to
say, I choose Mandrake 8.1 merely because I knew that it came with
mod_frontpage and I would not have to spend a whole lot of time tracking
down the software and recompiling apache like I would on slack.  The trade
off in ease of use is performance.  That's a hit I'm willing to take for now.

About an hours worth of time throughout the evening I had a mandrake box up
and running.  Once again, the install was painless.  Apache with frontpage
extensions was ready to go.

Now, actually using frontpage extensions is a whole other animal.  After
gettig the box to work, it took an additional two hours until I finally
figured out what was up and down with these damnable things.

Now I'm sitting pretty, here at work, with a new web server that cost only
my time.  And that was joyously given.  Tomorrow I present the system to my
boss as a gift.  The student's web is already up and going.  Having them
access the web in frontpage will be a breeze.  

So, not matter what decision is choosen, we all win in the end.  If they
elect not to use the server I built, no big deal.  The experience was nice.
 If they choose to have the IU host, it is their money they are wasting.  I
will take comfort in knowing that a short hop to netcraft will graciously
show that the IU is hosting their web sites also on Mandrake Linux with fp
ext's, php, and mysql; just like me. :-)

Hooray!


-- 
Daniel S. Washko
www.thelinuxlink.net/lvlinux
Lehigh Valley Linux Users Group
Get Slack (www.slackware.com) and get happy!