[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: Apache: Front Page Extensions??

[sdenny]

I hung back answering in hope that someone would come out with a
great FP success story.  Maybe they still will.

I installed FP on Apache a couple of years back in order to
keep a client.  I never got a warm fuzzy feeling about it.
There's not much in the way of documentation.

My initial impression was that it scribbled hundreds of little
files all over the disk much to my displeasure.

When we upgraded our webserver, I just left it on the old box and
didn't bother putting it on the new one.  So now we have one box
that only has the FP sites on it.  While at one time we were
getting requests for FP, it seems like those are very infrequent
now.

One of my major complaints about FP (other than I am never happy
having executables on a machine for which I have no clue what
they do) is in the upgrade department.  Once installed, it wasn't
quite clear to me how I would manage to upgrade apache and keep
FP in sync at the same time without breaking a piece of
in-service equipment taking out dozens of websites.

Ranking right up in the loser department is when we have users 
call up saying "My FP stuff doesn't work".  The loser part is I
can't really help them out since we don't know what the FP junk
does either.  Is their end or ours?  So without any extra revenue
we spend valuable support time grepping around looking for an
impossible fix and always just end up looking stupid.  So for all
the above reasons I quit advertising FP and will only
begrudgingly put new sites on the old box.

I will say that while there used to be lots of talk about FP, of
late it seems to have become suspiciously quiet as you may be
finding out.

To summarize, I can say that it is possible to make it work, but
it may not be worth the trouble.

If I were to do it again, I would just install an NT box, auto
backup hourly and auto reboot daily.  MS clients would think that
was just business as usual.

Regards,

Stephen Denny                                 mailto:sdenny at hex.net
Hex.Net Superhighway                             http://www.hex.net