Posted by Jay Paulson on 08/23/05 19:57

>> 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.

Thanks for the update!

> 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 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.

Have you tried PHP 4.x? Give that a shot and see what effects that has
on the application.

> 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.

You might want to post the code for your application on the list so we
all can see it (remember to remove usernames, passwords, and ip #'s).
It's too bad you have to use Windows and IIS. Just curious but why
are they not wanting to use Linux? Do they know it's free and way less
likely to be attacked?

Also, I'm sure there are people on this list that are experienced with
Windows and IIS that can help you determine if something with the setup
of it needs to be changed in order for your code to work.

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