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Thread: FPSE and web farm

Last post 12-20-2006 6:28 PM by tibor00. 3 replies.

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  • 12-19-2006, 1:20 PM

    • tibor00
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    • Joined on 12-19-2006, 1:11 PM
    • Posts 2

    FPSE and web farm

    I have a web farm hosting several FPSE-enabled sites.  Intermittently, the site owners report issues publishing to their sites intermittently, and I believe that this is almost always a permissions problem because of the local account that FPSE uses not having access to the other nodes in the farm.

     I ran across the Frontpage Server Best Practices article on Technet today, and have a question about the second bullet:

    In a web farm environment, dedicate one front-end web server to use for publishing with Frontpage.

    How does one "dedicate" a node for publishing?  I am relatively new to FPSE, so I don't see a way to do this.

    Any assistance is appreciated! 

     

     

  • 12-19-2006, 7:16 PM In reply to

    Re: FPSE and web farm

    Hey-

    I don't know the correct answer but I suppose it doesn't hurt to actually give a guess.  However, I have forwarded on to some more experts of mine on the IIS team and hopefully they will chime in with a specific answer.

    However, my guess is to setup a DNS record special for publishing that is pointed to a specific server in the cluster (as each should have a unique IP address) instead of the virtual IP for the web farm.  For example, consider the following:

    mydomain.com  --  A record goes to 10.0.0.12

    publishing.mydomain.com -- A record goes to 10.0.0.120 (a member of the .12 cluster)

    This could be wrong, but that is a educated guess on what they might mean.

    Hope that helps,

    ~Chris
    Former Program Manager
    IIS Product Unit (Microsoft)
  • 12-19-2006, 8:06 PM In reply to

    • robmcm
    • Top 50 Contributor
    • Joined on 05-26-2006, 9:05 PM
    • Redmond, WA
    • Posts 125

    Re: FPSE and web farm

    Chris is correct - although I should provide a little more information.

    Officially the FrontPage Server Extensions are "not supported" in a web farm configuration, but if you're willing to sacrifice some FrontPage functionality you can work around this limitation.

    First of all - you cannot simply publish to a web farm. FPSE was not designed to work this way, and even if you manage to hack a way into getting it to work there are no guarantees that it will continue to work. (Please take my word for it – you will save yourself a great deal of anguish in the long run.)

    If you try to use FPSE in a web farm where each of the nodes hosts their own copy of your content, you will run into a myriad of problems when saving results from web forms that are based on FrontPage's browse-time "bots", or when using FrontPage's save to Access database features if the database is hosted within the content of the site. There are other browse-time bots that come with FrontPage that will have problems, such as the hit counter, because they need to write data to the content area.

    That being said, if you host a site within a web farm that uses shared content, FPSE will not work because of a myriad of configuration issues. (FPSE stores configuration settings in many different places, all of which cannot easily be replicated and are even more difficult to maintain.)

    Using Chris' example, you could install FPSE to a single server and call that your "publishing server". You would then publish your content to that one server, and the content would then be replicated to your other servers. Once again, though, storing data from web forms would need to be addressed. (e.g. Use a remote SQL server instead of Access databases and don't use the FrontPage save-to-file web bots.) I would then use something like UrlScan with IIS6 or Request Filtering in IIS7 to block access to the "_vti_???" folders.

    Personally, I prefer using a "staging/authoring" server that has FPSE installed, and then use scheduled replication to push the content to the nodes in the web farm. (Either using shared content or per-server copies of the content.) None of the web farm nodes would need FPSE installed, but I would still use something like UrlScan with IIS6 or Request Filtering in IIS7 to block access to the "_vti_???" folders.

    I hope this helps!

    Robert McMurray (MSFT, IIS)
  • 12-20-2006, 6:28 PM In reply to

    • tibor00
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    • Joined on 12-19-2006, 1:11 PM
    • Posts 2

    Re: FPSE and web farm

    Rob,

    I knew about the unsupported nature of FPSE on web farms, but I had hopes that there was some way to publish to one node and then replicate to the remaining nodes.  When I saw the article I referenced above, I thought there might be published best practice in this space.  Unfortunately, there appears not to be an 'official' recommendatation.

     Based on your response, it looks like the publishing server idea is workable.  Since we're using Application Center 2000 SP1 on the farm to manage the replication of content and settings, and we already have DFS shares created for xcopy deployment of content, creating publishing URLs for FPSE content deployment makes sense.

    What I was concerned about is whether there is content int he _vti* folders that would reference the publishing URL vs the production (farm) URL, and whether this would cause a problem.  Any thoughts?

    Thanks!

    PS Chris, thanks for the input and referral!

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