Date: 06/03/06 (Web Development) Keywords: asp, web, linux, apache I've been doing some contract work for my former employer, who has been having some major difficulties. Their webhost migrated them with little warning and no support from a shared account on a Linux Apache server to a shared account on an Windows IIS server running Plesk. They rely heavily on Perl/CGI scripts, and the migration naturally broke all of them, despite assurances that it would not. So my job has been to get their scripts running again. However, this hit a major snag when I realized that their new server provides no server error logs. I've never worked with IIS before, but this seemed very wrong to me. Without the error logs, how are they supposed to debug their scripts? Numerous calls to the webhost's lackadaisical tech support were met with only incompetence (people who didn't know what server error logs were) and weak denials ("I don't think we can let you see those"). So I told my client that these people were incompetent, that their server was grossly misconfigured (a lot of other things that ought to have worked didn't work), and that the way they were being treated by the host was totally inappropriate for the price they were paying (as I understand it, an expensive corporate rate). I get 24-hour tech support with almost zero delay from my $10-a-month shared host, yet it takes these people several days to return a call about even the simplest of questions, usually with inadequate, unhelpful responses. It seems to me that these people migrated to IIS without having any clue what they were doing, and wheedled their ill-informed clients into following, despite their not having any need for IIS, ASP, or anything else related. I managed to fix most of the scripts through blind trial and error, ugly hacks, and brute force. But I don't think they should be having to deal with this. However, I'm well aware that I don't know anything about IIS, and before I push the matter further, I wanted to make sure it wasn't my own incompetence that was getting in the way. Is there any reason why an IIS server shouldn't provide server error logs to shared clients? Is there some other way to debug scripts that I'm missing? Am I correct in assessing that this webhost is a sinking ship of fools, and in advising them to jump overboard before they go down with it?
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