Posted by Rick Emery on 08/23/05 19:44

Quoting Rick Emery <rick@emery.homelinux.net>:

> Ugh, we're *never* going to make a decision. My boss just sent me this email:

A *huge* "THANK YOU!" to everybody who replied; it was extremely
helpful and, after my meeting with my manager this morning, she seemed
to accept that the article was dated and had inaccurate information.

Unfortunately, I may be fighting an uphill battle. I'll give background
for those who seemed interested in our progress, but it's pretty long,
so feel free to delete this and move on to your regularly scheduled
messages (though I'm secretly hoping that someone will have helpful
information or suggestions).

I wrote an application, using PHP5, that displays a list and refreshes
every 30 seconds (the data is constantly changing, but a 30 second
delay is acceptable). As I've indicated previously, we're a Microsoft
shop, so the data comes from MS SQL Server 2000. No problems, the app
worked great using my workstation as the server with a few clients
running the app from it. It even worked when we moved it to a server
and opened it up to everyone on our intranet (for a while).

We have two different types of clients. Some use desktop computers,
physically connected to our network, while others use mobile laptops
connected to our network via cellular (using Sprint AirCards) using
third-party VPN software (Padcom, in case anyone's familiar).

We set the application up on a Windows 2000 Server with IIS (5, I
think), and it would work fine for about a day. Then Padcom clients
kept stopping. They'd request the page and, after a loooooong time,
display a message that the request timed out. This would seemingly
happen for all Padcom-connected clients at the same time, though the
desktops continued to work fine. We restarted the server running the
Padcom software with no effect. We restarted IIS on the web server with
no effect. The only thing (seemingly) that cleared the issue was
rebooting the server running IIS.

I spent a day and a half looking at the issue with the network and
server administrators, but nobody could find where the problem was. So,
we moved it to a Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6; same problem. On my
own, I set up a linux server with apache and placed the application
there. They changed the DNS record to point to the linux server, and it
has run flawlessly ever since (53 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes). Nobody
has mentioned changing anything, until this morning. My manager
informed me in our meeting that no language could be chosen unless it
works under IIS.

So, I'm faced with finding an obscur problem, running on obscur
software (the vendor for Padcom, of course, insists that they've never
seen this problem). I'm confident that the problem has *nothing* to do
with PHP, but am forced by management to try to prove it.

That's it in a nutshell. Thanks again to everybody for your help and support.
Rick
--
Rick Emery

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth
with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there
you will always long to return"
-- Leonardo Da Vinci

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