Solo Technology

Thursday, one of the developers stopped by to tell me that he needed FrontPage Server extensions added to our dev server.

Now, I know he’s been working on some ASP.NET stuff so was forced to ask, “Why in the world do you need those?”

Turns out he was attempting to work with a pile of projects as sites and was getting an error assuring him that FP extensions were needed.

*sigh*

The server in question is running Windows 2000. With a quick search, I learned that the current version of the extensions is 2002. I then spent an hour trying to find a download of that version. I may not always be smart, but I’m persistent…

Finally gave up on the dream of downloading the ‘02 version and did the Add or Remove Windows Components thing and added the 2000 version instead. Seemed to be my only option at any rate.

Next, I fired up the IIS service manager, right-clicked on the directory in question and … realized I couldn’t add extensions to it. Apparently I need to start at the top level? Yup, seems likely. So, I run the little wizard turn it loose and it seems to hang. Check drive I/O and I can see it is doing something so I let it trundle along for the next 6 hours.

At the 6 hour mark, we’re having other issues with the server (turned out to be a bad port on a hub of all things!) and I kill the wizard, just in case that was the issue (wasn’t).

Our dev server has a ton of apps, file libraries and client directories. Thousands of ‘em, to be precise.

So, what was that wizard doing? I dunno, but one thing it was doing was going to every directory, creating a _vti_cnf directory and loading it with 1k’ish files named the same as the parent directory.

This created quite a slow-down when my nightly mirror job ran to sync some of the doc lib directories from dev to prod. QUITE a slow-down indeed. It also likely cost me some money with overages to the data center network. Why? Well sure the new files are small, but it added at least 7000 extra files to transmit to the prod box.

Server extensions are no longer on that server.

I ran the windows search for _vti_cnf, got a list of ‘em all (3800′ish). Ctrl-A to select all. Delete to kill ‘em. Pointed the devs at another much less used IIS server for ASP.NET stuff.

Moral: Don’t add server extensions to a web server with tons of content! If there was a way to do it so I wasn’t at the web root level, I sure wish I’d found it.

Know what really bugs me about this?  I could be wrong, but if I recall correctly, the original FP Server extensions were not even written by Microsoft.  Weren’t they acquired when MS bought that old version of FP (side editorial on FrontPage in general saved for another day) back in the 90s? Regardless, they concept is so damned old.  Why the hell is it part of ASP.NET 2.0?!?

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