OT: Apache and frontpage

[Rick Stevens]

karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
>>Waldher, Travis R wrote:
>>
>>>Ok... let's get past the AACKK!!! Why would you poison your linux box
>>>with that!?? Lol
>>>
>>>Is there a GOOD step by step tutorial on how to use the frontpage
>>>extensions on the server side anywhere?  I have them loaded, I just
>>>don't know how to use them and make it available for my websites.
>>
>>Oh, GOD!  Frontpage with Apache is a farking nightmare, Travis.  We
>>used to offer it and gave it up as a real management nightmare.  I'd
>>have to go back and look at my archives to give you details, but I do
>>recall that each user's directory has to have the FP executables in it.
>>Doing this on a virtualhost system can be horrific.
>>
>>Man, if I could ever dissuade you from even offering such an awful
>>abomination, I'd do it.  Microsoft doesn't even support it anymore.
>>
>>There are literally hundreds of HTML generators out there that only need
>>an FTP upload to make them live and they'll work on IE, Apache or any
>>other webserver out there.  Do NOT get into this black hole.  Trust me!
>>Treat it like a hotel fire...stay low and just get the hell outathere!
> 
> 
> Come on Rick, quit beating around the bush and tell us what you REALLY
> think.  8^}

You know me, Karl...I'm as subtle as getting whacked by a 2 x 4 between
the eyes.  ;-)

> Seriously, I have a client on which their ISP installed Frontpage
> extensions. After we decided to upgrade their server, they decided not to
> use Frontpage anymore, it was a nightmare just getting all that garbage
> OFF the system. . .

Yup.  It's not clearly documented how to do (I figured it out, but it
took a while) it and doing it on a machine with virtualhost entries is
bloody awful--especially when we did it on a four-way hardware
load-balanced system.

I do recall that we had to write a bunch of very odd Perl modules and
bugger the Apache 1.x source to make it work.  Add modperl to the mix
and I damned near tore my hair out.  And you had to do it every time a
new release of Apache came out.  The last straw was when Apache 2.x came
out.  I had to spend a lot of time re-engineering what needed to be
patched and where.

We finally looked at the revenue stream that we got from the
Apache/Unix/Frontpage and decided to kill that product.  We had a
parallel web service based on IIS (gaaaack!), so we told folk that if
they wanted FP, they had to use our IIS-based service.  Many people
hated us for that (you can't keep an IIS system running for more than
a week without a reboot).  Our Unix servers have been up for, oh, more
than a year.  Here's one of the four servers:

[root at uvc-01-0004-01 root]# uptime
   2:59pm  up 392 days, 21:20,  1 user,  load average: 0.99, 1.71, 2.07

(Oh, and that's on a fully-patched Fedora Core 1 system)
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  Memory is the second thing to go, but I can't remember the first! -
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