I Just Upgraded This Website

 

I've been running this website on a 15 year old (at the time of this writing) PC, using a Pentium II processor.  That PC is also using Windows 98, and the website was running on the web server that came with the OS; Personal Web Server (PWS).  This has worked out just fine for this website, since not a lot of people visit it (PWS only allows 2 or 3 simultaneous connections), and it's an incredibly easy server to setup (you start it and it goes).  However, my wife asked me about hosting a website on our PC. My wife knew I was already doing that for my personal web page, but had never visited it. So I gave my wife the url to this site, and after seeing it she asked me to set her up (she must be having problems with her hosting company).

I didn't want to put my wife's site on PWS, or an overly ancient PC, so I installed and started up IIS5.1 on my Windows XP system and moved all of my website files and folders to this system (the XP system). Unfortunately, it didn't work. I had to play around with the setting on the IIS server (there isn't a checkbox for, "Use PWS settings", so I had to do all of this manually) and finally got my website to show up again. The system I'm using is only 7 years old (as of the time of this writing) and uses a Pentium IV processor. One advantage of this is I was now able to remove an ActiveX object I was using to make my home videos playable on the Pentium II system. Most browsers have ActiveX blocked, so they couldn't view my home videos anyway. Try it out: go to my home page and click on "Home Movies In a Dynamic Format". The videos just run, and you don't get an alert that pops up, telling you it can't optimize the video (which would happen when my ActiveX object would try to run on a browser with default settings).

The only functionality that has gotten worse is the mortgage amortization calculator on the home page. It used to run just fine when I hosted my site at http://holm.ru  but gave less accurate results when I moved it to my Windows 98 system. The results are even worse now!  I wrote this calculator in JavaScript, so I thought it had something to do with the JavaScript engine on Windows 98, but now I don't know what to think. Rather then troubleshoot this, I'll probably replace my JavaScript code with a Java applet (and just download one off of the Internet). If somebody else's Java applet doesn't give me good results, I'll probably break down and write my own Java applet.

I did want to let the readers of this blog know about one gotcha. When I first got this website to show up on IIS5.1 I had to write out the full url like http://community-info.org/index.html  If I left off the index.html at the end I'd get a 403 error (access denied). I have index.html listed as one of the default documents in IIS, so this was surprising. I messed around with the setting until I got rid of the 403 error, but then my browser tried to download my index.html file (I let it, and I was able to view it in a browser window). I didn't start working on this until 12:30 AM (my wife was working on her website, and I didn't want to interfere with her internet connection; waited until she was done with it), so I was up till 4 AM working on this. Before giving up, I tried visiting this site from my Windows 98 system, but only typed in http://community-info.org - the website popped right up!  Normally I'd have the good sense to visit my website from another system before investigating a problem like this, so I'll blame this on fatigue.

My cat was hungry at 9 AM, so she woke me up to feed her. After giving her a can of cat food, I checked on this website by typing http://community-info.org on the Windows XP system (the one actually running the IIS server for this site) and my web page popped right up! At first glance, last night, it looked like some kind of loopback issue, but I ran some tests that seem to have ruled that out. It's probably some kind of propagation issue. It's good to know that IIS issues can be self correcting (maybe I should still try to run down the root cause cause of this issue, but it has become a non-issue). I didn't experience any latency issues with PWS, so I'm surprised that IIS5.1 would have any. I used to use Apache, and I never experienced any propagation issues or latency issues with it; C'est la vie.

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