[ms4w-users] MS4W Production Status

[Steve Schnick]

Thanks, Paul. That was exactly what I was looking for.

So there are no specific configuration settings that you are aware of in
the MS4W distribution (e.g., Apache, PHP, etc.) that would render the
MS4W installation unsuitable for production? As I understand it, the
"non-production" caveat means that the developers of MS4W will take no
responsibility for its use in a production environment (which seems fair
to me). Is this correct?

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Spencer [mailto:pspencer at dmsolutions.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 12:49 PM
To: Steve Schnick
Cc: ms4w-users at lists.maptools.org
Subject: Re: [ms4w-users] MS4W Production Status

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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