Knowledgebase

FrontPage is a Microsoft program used to create and edit HTML documents. It can be used to create large complex Websites. FrontPage is a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor, meaning that you can create the Web page exactly as you want it to look on the screen, and the program adds the HTML source code necessary to make sure that the page looks right in a Web browser. FrontPage allows you to FTP, or publish, your site through FrontPage. This section of the manual will take you through all of the necessary steps to publish your web directly from FrontPage.

Basic Settings

To publish your Web site to our servers, you will need to use the following information:

• Publish destination: http://www.yourdomain.com
• Username: your domain
• Password: your password

You will need to replace the above text with your own FrontPage account information.

Publishing Your Web

1. After you have created your Web and are ready for the pages to go "live," you will then need to publish the Web using the Front Page publish feature.
2. Go to File > Publish Web (see Figure 1). The Publish Destination dialog box will open (see Figure 2).
3. You will then be asked to specify the Publish Destination. You must use the full URL http://www. yourdomain.com and NOT ftp. yourdomain.com.
4. Click OK.
5. You will be asked for your username and password (see Figure 3).
6. Specify the pages you want to publish.
   1. In the Publish Web dialog box, click Options in the lower left corner.
   2. Click the Publish tab and do one or more of the following:
      • Under Publish, specify whether you want to publish only pages that have changed or all pages.
      • Under Changes, specify how you want FrontPage to determine which pages have been changed.
      • If you want to create a log file for changes made during publishing, select that check box.
   3. Click OK.
7. To publish subwebs, select the Include subwebs check box.
8. Click on the Publish button at the bottom of the window.

Extending a Virtual Server (Secondary Domain)

To use FrontPage with a secondary domain, you will need to use the following settings.

1. Mark sure that the domain alias is NOT a sub-domain of the web root (The alias should be somewhere like /var/www/domain and not /var/www/html/domain).
2. Login to the FrontPage Admin: Site Applications > Development > FrontPage Extensions 2002 > Admin Link (you will then need the admin username and password that was given when the FrontPage extensions were originally installed).
3. Under Server Configuration File Path enter the full path to the Apache config file (e.g. /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).
4. Leave the Port at the default: 80.
5. Under Hostname, enter the secondary domain (e.g. domain.com).
6. Under Administrator user name and Administrator Account Password enter the user name and password which will be used in FrontPage for the secondary domain.
7. Under UNIX User Account Username enter the primary account domain name.
8. Under UNIX Group Account Name enter the primary account user name.

Troubleshooting

If you are having any problems uploading, copying, or opening your website, or with the non-FrontPage portion of your site, please be sure to note the following:

Never use FTP or SSH in those directories where you are using FrontPage. FrontPage will not see anything you manually upload, and any configurations you alter could cause big problems with your FrontPage extensions. You can also safely FTP to a subdirectory within your www directory, BUT you must create a subdirectory using your FTP program. This will not work if you create the sub-directory using FrontPage. For information on how to use FrontPage, see the online help that comes with FrontPage. Microsoft also has newsgroups and FAQs devoted to FrontPage where you might find answers to your questions.

Common Problems with FrontPage

Server timing out when publishing large sites.
This difficulty arises when the uploading link times out in the process of copying the web to our server. The only suggestion Microsoft has offered so far is to break the main web into a group of subwebs on your PC, and then upload these individually. If this problem persists for you, please contact support.

Getting Error - Front Page Extensions Not Installed
We often see this error being reported even when the extensions have been installed. If you get this error, first verify the extensions are installed on your account.

1. Log in to your site manager.
2. Click on Site Applications > Development.
3. If the extensions are not installed, install them and then try again. If the extensions are installed and you still cannot connect, contact technical support.

Getting Error - Could not write to file... or Could not close file...
This is caused by not having any space left on your account. You will need to remove some files or upgrade your account.

Important FTP Server Disconnect Information

Properly disconnecting from your FTP server is critical to maintaining the availability of your FTP server. To better understand why it is important you should have a little knowledge of how an FTP server operates. Initially, when you connect to your FTP server, a single FTP process is spawned. This process is spawned to manage the connection but does not manage transferring your data itself. Once you begin to transfer files across the connection additional processes will be spawned to handle the transfer up to the FTP process limit imposed by your hosting provider. As you can see, generally speaking, successful use of an FTP server will use more than one process. Your FTP client does control the number of processes that are spawned and when those processes will die off after the transfer is complete. Now that we have a simplistic description of what is happening we can also establish why proper use of your FTP client is important to maintaining server availability. As you can see there is some responsibility placed on your FTP client to manage the FTP connection and processes. If a disconnection is handled improperly, your FTP client isn't allowed to clean up after itself and can potentially leave FTP processes running on your server indefinitely. This only becomes a problem when you try to establish a connection to your FTP server and the FTP processes left running from improper disconnects are equal to or higher than your FTP process limit. To allow your FTP client to properly close the connection you should find and utilize the disconnect function if your client supports the functionality. You should avoid simply closing the application unless this is the only option that your client supports.