RE: [TCLUG:9106] MS FrontPage woes

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> I will tell you right now that unless you want to do 20 hours of work per
> week more, *do not* under *any* circumstances install these extensions.
> They are purposefully made to work badly under Unix so that people will
> feel like they have to move to NT/IIS. They are flaky beyond belief and
> the client software is no better.
>
> Did I mention the security risk?


  Not to defend MS, but I think you may be attributing to malice what can be
sufficiently explained by incompetence.  The MS extensions haven't cost me
any extra work here (apart from the hour or two it takes to install them)
and have saved me a boatload of calls from the techno-illiterates in
marketing who were previously unable to understand why an image tag linking
to "file://c:/pictures/logo.gif" wasn't working on the server.

  The security risks are largely due to a bad out-of-the box setup --
something that any number of Linux distributions are also guilty of.
They're nothing that can't be fixed by a sufficently cluesome administrator.
They're not so much victims of flakiness as overcomplexity.

  On the other hand, the apache_fp patch that MS provides *is* flaky, a
security risk, and probably actively evil.  I heartily recommend that folks
stay away from it.  Both FP 98 and 2000 work just as well (if not better)
without it.  Besides, it's about 12 minor release numbers behind the current
Apache binary anyways, and MS is showing no signs of updating any time soon.