[WBEL-users] FrontPage eGads!!!

[John Hinton]

Cured!

I just 'love' Microsoft Products! <not> They self heal! You see the 
whole key to getting FPSEs working was this. First, you install MSN 
Instant Messaging, then you install FrontPage (what on earth could this 
have to do with FPSEs?). And this was the whole key to getting this 
running, for you see, in the process of installing these programs, 
something conflicted with something on my Winders box and I've been 
regularly getting the 'blue screen of death'. Apparently, without this 
"self-healing" application, which I had always just deemed a terrible 
PITA, I would not have rebooted my machine! Apparently, MSIE holds 
somehow, even though I never checked remember user/pass in any of the 
htaccess pop-up windows, some information which would not allow me to 
login even though I had everything right at the wonderful WhiteBox 
Enterprise Linux server level! Without this 'healing' 'blue screen of 
death', you see, I would not have restarted MSIE and would still be 
stuck with what appeared to be a broken FPSE install! Thank you Bill for 
this beautiful built in system!

Meanwhile... for any others fighting through this install. Here are a 
few keys which a NOT documented, or are only found in obsure webpages 
placed sparsely across the internet.

suEXEC needs to be turned OFF. (I just commented out the LoadModule 
statement and all references to it in the vhost areas).

xuser and xpass are NOT the username and pass of the unix user, but the 
username and pass of apache, which by default on WBEL is apache and 
apache. Which is the whole reason for needing suEXEC turned off.

You will need to decide upon a port for the admin access to FPSE and 
open it in the firewall.

You will need to chmod 755 the http log directory.

You will need destroy the mime magic module settings so that the images 
actually display within the FPSE admin pages.
This works....
<IfModule mod_mime_magic.c>
#   MIMEMagicFile /usr/share/magic.mime
    MIMEMagicFile conf/magic
    MIMEMagicFile /dev/null
</IfModule>

You will need to set AllowOverride All pretty much everywhere. That's 
what I read and I haven't yet gone back in to see where perhaps this is 
not needed.

If you want to use a Browser and do the server extensions (setups), you 
really need to use MSIE. It can be done via Mozilla, but it will try to 
download the .exe that MSIE just runs (security anyone?). And if you 
don't click on those download buttons in the proper order, you will 
destroy a root FPSE sytem file which will make you start all over with 
the entire install again! So, to be on the safe side, use MSIE for this 
if nothing else. You can also do all the installs from the command line, 
but I've not found all the keys to doing both the install and then the 
setup for that user to have the authoring abilities, but I'm sure it is 
there somewhere.

I am SO happy that I decided to install this on a server by itself. So 
many security features built into Apache 2 have to be messed with, in 
particular suEXEC, that I really don't want this to effect my 'good' 
systems. People who want to use FPEs, can ask for them, I'll move them 
over to that box, give it to them and they will be informed of the 
security issues and have made the choice themselves. When it crashes, it 
will be only FP users suffering from using a terrible program.

Hope this helps someone else!

John Hinton