Posted by Miles Thompson on 08/23/05 20:28

At 01:44 PM 8/23/2005, Rick Emery wrote:
>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


Rick,

Deepest sympathy.

So you have a solution which works, for everyone, but doctrine dictates
differently. I'd suspect VPN / IIS interaction.

If I was your manager, I'd take comfort from the FACT that you were able to
switch everything over to Linux and it ran w/o difficulty. Cripes, if you
had this problem with ColdFusion you'd be sitting there, a lonely soul,
amongst the finger-pointers, and nothing would be running.

Best regards - Miles

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