Recently in Webservers Category

Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanelAric's cpanel userguide and tutorial book to assist with learning some of the more obscure features and functions and as I was reading through the book I got to page 93 - and my site is quoted as a way to backup the system - how cool is that!
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.

I was moving a test site to a live site this morning and in doing so added a couple of redirect lines to the htaccess file/ mod rewrite installation to try and move any broken links to the main index.php page. Unfortunately this has somehow broken the website and now every single page ends up with a 302 which firefox displays as "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete."
I've removed all the redirections that I can find but for some reason the website is still running the redirection as valid test html pages still get redirected to the php page and then the 302. I think I am going to have to wait until the webservice is restarted but I've logged a ticket in the meantime.

Oops - the Download Squad website is broken at the moment coming up with the error message "Microsoft VBScript compilation error '800a03e9' Out of memory /b-c/design-43/posts.asp,line 0". I'm not quite sure how you can have an error in line 0 of a web page but this does give you information on the structure of the website.
Interestingly, a google search shows that the problem is either a string/line which is over 1022 characters long or that you can't have more than 64 for/next loops in a web page.

Uniform Server looks like a promising Windows Apache Mysql PHP server. Currently I'm using foxserv but it has not been updated for years - this one promises to be kept up to date and the next version is apparently around the corner.

I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church's website which runs under Mambo (which I'm starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac's in the house and doesn't really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn't working - it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn't come back with any details - instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file - only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto - php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn't find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn't find anything in google...I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn't.

Anyway, we carried on with testing on the "live" site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of Wordpress - might be easier.

Fixing "connection refused" when trying to ftp into iis, "the system cannot find the drive specified" when using the iis admin interface, "2148073487: object already exists" when trying to start the ftp service and "0x8009000F = Object Already Exists" when trying to reload IIS onto a w2k server. That should sort out the google search requests - for details read on.......

No I haven't gone over to the dark side but I needed to do some investigation on .net web pages, in particular to do with accessing sql databases. My first discovery is that you don't need Windows2003 for your web server - you can use xp/w2k with the .net framework installed (I thought .net only came with w2k3 but I was wrong).
I found WebMatrix which is a .aspnet gui builder and works pretty well too. You don't even need IIS installed and using the walkthrough it didn't take long to access data on a remote sql machine. Its not available on the internet so its not available as a demo.
unfortunately it doesnt work on my version of IIS - works with the included webserver but not IIS. If I use ie then it complains about unterminated strings, and firefox asks me what I want to do with the file!
Update According to Experts Exchange I needed to run aspnet_regiis.exe -i -enable from the location that I installed .net into. However the installation of .net doesn't ask where you want to install this software (C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 in my case)

From Netcrafts survey, the first Web Server Survey ran in August 1995 and found 18,957 sites. NCSA and CERN were the leading web servers of the day, in front of Netscape which had recently IPO'd, and the Apache project which started a few months earlier in March 1995. Microsoft-IIS, HTTP/1.1 hosting and domain name registrars were not then on the horizon.

In the August 2003 survey we received responses from 42,807,275 sites.
(My first domain appeared in March 1999) although I was using geocities a longtime before that.

Microsoft have kindly provided a stress test program for webservers . I'm not sure if its just IIS that it would be good for as I've not had a chance to play with it fully yet. Interestingly the original working name for the program was homer!