[WBEL-users] FrontPage eGads!!!
John Hinton
webmaster@ew3d.com
Sat, 14 Aug 2004 11:17:21 -0400
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