I am wondering how you would handle this.....

[scorpion53061]

I would like your thoughts and impressions of the events of today and ask
how you would handle this or if I am wrong and this is "normal" behaviour
for a web provider and IIS.

I am normally a vb.net windows programmer but I needed to do some web work
that involved web pages and data access. I was excited when I found out my
web provider had the ability to have ASP.NET applications built there.

I was in the process of attempting to create a ASP.NET web applicationon my
webprovider's web server. When I attempted to do so through Visual
Studio.NET it would create the web as I named it but would not take the
username and password I use in Frontpage thus not allowing me access to do
anything with it. When I went in these webs created in the process using
Frontpage it would prompt me about needing me to log in with another account
because mine did not have permissions for this folder. When I hit cancel it
showed the folders inside the web Visual Studio had created but would not
allow me to do anything with them.

I called the ISP and they had me create the web application locally and then
FTP it to their server with our username and password in the URL itself. I
did not think it would work as configuration information would be all wrong
(each ASP.NET application is configured to work with that server) but I
followed their instructions anyway. I used Internet Explorer to get to the
ftp site.

It did not work. I am sure there are permission issues going on here but
they do not know (they need to have the ASP.NET there to tell developers
they have it and attract their business but it seems they themselves have no
idea how to use the Framework on the server which I find baffling.). If
anyone can venture a guess on what I should suggest to them that would be
cool. I do not have these issues with IIS on my machine when creating
ASP.NET applications but I probably do not have the issues they are
contending with.

While on the ftp server the link was something like
ftp://www2.sampleispname.net/www/mywebsitefolder/mydomainname.org/

which I believe took me to what appears to have been a virtual directory
listing.
A link was present there saying

Up to higher level directory

and when I clicked it it took to

ftp://www2.sampleispname.net/www/mywebsitefolder/

which contained my web.

Off to the left was a link to the next directory up which was called "www".

Not sure what it was I clicked it and much to my dismay there was every
single web site folder they had. I was able to open all of the folder and
view the contents of the folders - even the code behind asp scripts and
such. I was able to copy and paste content from any of these web sites to my
computer. I could not actually write to the folder however. I have a feeling
a more experienced guy than me probably would have been able to. (By the way
in case you are wondering when I tried to write to it I took a empty text
file and tried to paste it in and when I copied anything to my comptuer I
immediately deleted it. I am not at all interested in the contents pf these
folders but in why I could do this..)

It is a sunday and I left a message to talk to the administrator. I got a
call back from a 16 year old who I think answers the phones there (that is
what he is doing every time I am there to pay my bill) and he indicated to
me that there web server is totally secure and I basically was just wrong.

I don't know. I just got a real sick feeling in my stomach during this
process. If this is normal, it should not be. Monday can't get here fast
enough.

 

[Cor Ligthert]

Hi Scorpion,

When that of the reading of the contents from others is true and I
understand the rest well, I would ask CJ in the VB.language newsgroup for a
good provider in your country.

When they are not able to make that impossible, I think that it will be a
hard way to go to get an aspx site to run there.

Just my thougth about this.

Cor

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

I would strongly suggest that you immediately find another web host, as you should not at any time
be able to access any content that is outside of folder associated with your account as a web
hosting client.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

 

[Karl Hungus]

Well, the first thing is as an independent developer, dealing with hosting
companies and ISPs is usually the worst part of developing a site for a
client that cant afford a dedicated hosting environment. You cant count on
any hosting company that says they support this or that framework/middleware
until youve actually gone in and run some tests and prototypes on your own.
Many unfortunate things can go wrong, such as incorrect versions,
permissions getting reset and the like. Stuff breaks in the best of
situations, and it can only get worse when your infrastructure is totally
out of your control.

With regards to your ftp situation, you should not count on the ftp client
in windows, but rather on something like wsftp which is a better client. Its
actually not unheard of that you can view other peoples folder, although its
not a great situation and you dont really see that happening anymore. I dont
use an ms IDE to develop so Im not familiar with the nature of transfering
through frontpage/visual studio - although that is a much better way to work
than having to drag files into an ftp client everytime you want to move
something over to test it.

My suggestion is you drop your isp and find a hosting company that
specializes in .net hosting. Ive heard good things about maximumasp.com but
havent used them. i used halfpricehosting.com for a lot of asp projects and
had generally good results with them but have not used them for a .net
project besides my own site. Good luck.

 

[chris leeds]

seems to me that the host isn't up to .net snuff.
when (in the rare opportunity) I need to set up a .net application, I just
bring the folders and files into a FrontPage subweb, do what I have to in
the way of editing, then publish to the server into a FrontPage subweb.
then I contact the host and tell them to make a .net app on that subweb.
it works OK, the only thing is that sometimes I've got to wait a little
while for them to set up the necessary stuff on the server.
the .net apps seem to run OK and I've worked with an associate on them on
the server and haven't had any problems.
all that said, I don't do .net all that much but it's been ok. I think
you've got a host problem, or at the very least a server admin problem.
HTH

 

[Roger Abell [MVP]]

First reaction is that they are clueless.

Did they provide a service level agreement (yeah, right) that waranteed
your code's privacy ?

Second reaction is that they have no clue how bad things can become
if they trust the FrontPage server extensions to do the right thing when
it comes to permissioning.

That you could create and read/write access in VS but not FP can sometimes
be accounted for by the NTFS permissions on single files inside the _vti
dirs
that the FPSE maintain (maintain? ok, for which they are responsible).

Final reaction - from this situation run, their learning curve likely
contains too
many bumps at this point for you to hide from their shortfalls. Even if
there is
no service level agreement letting you out without financial hurt, the time
you
save, code safety gained, etc. will make it pay off.