[ms4w-users] MS4W Production Status

[Paul Spencer]

Steve,

there are a couple of reasons...

When we first put this together, there were warnings in the Apache 
documentation about its use on Windows not being as secure/stable as on 
*nix systems.  I'm not sure if this has changed since we updated to 2.0 
... To offset this, I suppose you could consider running with IIS but 
I'm not sure that I would consider IIS *more* stable/secure than Apache ;)

When we first put this together, it was pretty experimental.  I would 
venture to guess that since it has been around for a while now, we could 
consider it more stable by volume of useage and lack of problems.

Probably the most significant issue, however, is that we are not 
prepared to warrant and support it as such, including any legal 
obligations that might be involved in such a claim.  As with most 
software, including a lot of commercial software, it is provided AS-IS 
and is not warranted for any particular purpose.  We provide it to the 
community because it is a tool we have found useful for several 
purposes, including aiding in rapid deployment, training situations 
where replication of a consistent environment is key, and in packaging 
some of our software.

AFAIK, all of the components included with MS4W are particularly stable 
and you should not feel that you cannot use this for a production 
environment, but we will accept no responsibility if you do and 
something fails.

As an additional note, there was a bug reported recently with ADODB 
talking to PostgreSQL (or failing to) because of a problem with the PHP 
version we included with the last update.  This is exactly the type of 
situation which is well beyond our control or ability to detect. 
However, if we said it was production quality, there should be a 
reasonable expectation that you could update your server and not crash 
anything.  If you did, and ran into this issue ... what a mess!

We will definitely continue to support ms4w and release new versions to 
fix problems and introduce new features, but we do not currently plan to 
advocate its use in any sort of production environment.

Cheers

Paul

Steve Schnick wrote:
> Could someone please explain why the MS4W package is considered NOT 
> stable and NOT suitable for production purposes? Is it because of some 
> security settings in the default Apache configuration, the low-level CGI 
> executables (i.e., Mapserver) or something else? What would it take to 
> convert the default MS4W installation into a production-quality 
> installation?
>  
> Thanks.
> 
> 
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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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