In case your memory doesn’t go back a full week, here’s the question we’re confronting:
Dear Final Debug: I’m having trouble getting Microsoft Site Server to work in a vanilla NT environment. I’m using other BackOffice products, such as Exchange Server and SQL Server 6.5, with no problem but the server freezes every time I try to call up Site Server. I’ve got the necessary system requirements: a 266 MHz Pentium system with 64M bytes of RAM, and half a gigabyte of free space on my hard disk, and I’ve installed the Service Pack 2 for NT 4.0. Help!-Owen Smith, Chicago.
We didn’t answer last week because, frankly, we were stumped, too. We installed Site Server on a machine with exactly the same specs and our machine crashed when we ran it. So we spent some time on the phone this week with Owen and some of our pals at Microsoft and MSDN. We have an answer…we think.
The problem was not with any of the basic elements of Site Server (like Visual InterDev). Rather it was due to the beta version of FrontPage 98 on Owen’s machine. Installation seemed to hang every time Owen tried to install the FrontPage Server Extensions. Owen kept rebooting and would try to install-each time the machine would hang and reboot itself.
As it turns out, the installation wasn’t hanging. It was working at a pace so slow it was taking many hours to complete. Unfortunately, the program does not include notification to the user warning that installation is sluggish and no one would expect it to take the time that it does. Here’s the answer we got yesterday from Microsoft technical support:
“The Front Page Server Extensions are examining each Web root and file on the server and listing them for use with the extensions. Unfortunately, the APIs used are not sufficient for the size of your Web site. The setup program will eventually finish. However, if you feel a need to install the program faster, remove all the Web roots and add them back after installation.”
Indeed, Owen has a stuffed root directory in his server (as do we). Yesterday afternoon, he ran the install program before he left the office and it completed sometime in the middle of the night. This morning, he reports that all elements of Site Server appear to be in well working order.
We have a winner!
We’re awarding a copy of Borland’s Delphi 3 to the first person who sent us the correct answer to this question:
Where can you purchase a battery for a Compaq LTE Lite 25c laptop computer?
The “trick” part of the question is that Compaq has not supported this model for years and few third-party makers have picked it up. But some have. The first to find a supplier was our winner, Jim Cox, who found it available via McGlen Micro. He wins Delphi 3.
Only seconds later, we received another pointer to McGlen Micro, from Jeff Grosso. He also sent us a picture of the battery, which earns him a second-place prize of another Borland development product, IntraBuilder.
Eleven other people submitted correct answers. Thanks to all for entering. Next week, we’ll have a new contest, with a copy of Microsoft Site Server-which we can now certify as in working order-as the prize.
