BigBiz Internet Services is a Registered Web Presence Provider for Microsoft® FrontPage® 98 (this page last revised on Monday August 30, 1999)

Please note: we recommend all users upgrade to Microsoft® FrontPage® 2000.

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News and Tips for our FrontPage 98 users

12/30/97: Apache / FrontPage 98 Security Issues

There have been recent reports circulating regarding the Apache/FrontPage 98 SUID wrapper program FPEXE, which may permit knowledgeable users to circumvent the security mechanism. Do not be alarmed, in our configuration we DO NOT USE FPEXE, and therefore your BigBiz account is unaffected. We do not use any suid wrappers on our system.

Some of you may have experienced unexplained server errors when the web is recalculating hyperlinks. This happens when you explicitly do a "Recalculate Hyperlinks" or happens automatically at the end of publishing your web. The error messages look like

Server Error
Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration
and was unable to complete your request...

We identified the error in configuration of text indexing and fixed it. If you ran into this error in the past, you might want to try doing a "Recalculate Hyperlinks" on your web now.

see also A step-by-step tutorial on setting up a password protected sub web.

FrontPage 98 has built-in password protection for directories, by allowing you to specify protection on a per-web basis. When you create a protected web, you can use the Tools/Permissions menu item. To protect a web specify Use unique permissions for this web, then OK. Then use Tools/Permissions again and goto the Users tab, you can add users with browse rights, and then click on Only registered users have browse access.

We recommend all FrontPage 98 based webs to use the built-in FrontPage 98 permissions to maintain maximum compatibility. Especially do not mix the traditional UNIX/Apache protection methods we describe on our design guide with FrontPage 98 based webs as the two methods are incompatible.

We upgraded our webserver to Apache 1.2.5 on 2/5/98 and discovered some configuration problems which mostly affected FrontPage users. We have fixed all the problems as of 2/6/98. If you had difficulty with either publishing or browsing your FrontPage base web-site on 2/5, please try it again and report any problems to us.

The problems were traced to

• Bug in Apache handling of wildcards in ScriptAlias, we fixed the problem and sent the fix to apache.org
• File locking for FrontPage extensions config file. We redesigned the configuration and not only is the locking problem gone, but your operations should be faster too.

As a bonus, you can now refer to your virtual domains with or without the "www."; everything should work the same. However we recommend users stick to the industry standard "www." convention.

Some users have reported that publishing to a FrontPage enabled domain sometimes brings up the Web Publishing Wizard (FTP) dialog box. If this happens, check to see that your Internet connection is up and active, for example use a browser and try to goto some popular sites. Sometimes if the connection is either down or hung, the FrontPage Explorer will fail to communicate to the server causing it to think that the extensions aren't installed and then defaulting to use the Web Publishing Wizard.

If your Internet connection is an on-demand dialup (most users have this type of connection), you might try forcing the system to dial in and establish a connection before publishing with FrontPage.

Hit Counters that are put onto your web page using "Insert Active Element" do not work, use "Insert FrontPage Component" instead. Thanks to Joe Petrone of Petrone Associates for the tip.

We do not know if other components are affected.

Microsoft released updated extensions today. The most notable differences affecting users are

• Hit Counter sometimes hang, fixed.
• Discussion Webs with messages sorted in reverse chronological order works now
• "NORTBOTS.HTM missing" error has been fixed.

If your webs show any of these symptoms, you should re-publish them to get the fixes.

bobby@insectworld.com reports the following:
This is insectworld.com. I am reporting a FrontPage 98 Bug. When you create a table with empty cell, front page automatically puts a space in the empty cell, so that the cell will appear as an empty cell online. If there was no space in an empty cell, the cell would disappear. So FrontPage automatically inputs a space so that the cell will show. This is very convenient. But if you drag a horizontal line down or up, for some reason, frontpage deletes all spaces in empty cells.