On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 10:54:39PM -0500, Tom Haapanen wrote:
> OK, I throw my hands up and plead for help.

I've tried installing the FP extensions. 

I didn't throw up my hands and plead for help, I mearly threw up. This
was on HP-UX 9.05 and Solaris 2.5.1, but the principle is the same.

You shoulda heard me describing my story in a meeting. 

Q: "Did you get a chance to try and install the extensions?"

A: (some number of minutes in) "... And then I installed an 8-bit clean
sed so I could edit the paths in executables...."

It wasn't pretty.
 
> I had previously ignored compat_osf1 as I had no need for it, but now I
> wanted to install the FrontPage extensions on the web server -- and, there,
> Digital Unix is the only supported Alpha platform.  So I downloaded the DU
> version of the extensions, faked it out to believe that NetBSD is really
> Digital Unix, and things were going along pretty well ... until I got hit
> with a mysterious error message;
> 
> usr/local/frontpage/version4.0/bin/fpsrvadm.exe: No such file or directory

You got an error message instead of just failure?

Hot damn. That's improvement. 

Where is this file (fpsrvadm.exe) located?

Which program is giving this error message?

Do you have /usr/local/frontpage pointing as a symlink to the location
you have the tools installed (or do you have them installed in 
/usr/local/frontpage)? Does that executable exist? 

What's the current directory that the program giving the error was 
running in?

Did the fpsrvadm.exe actually run? What files did it attempt to open?
Don't bother with the documentation, last time I checked it sucked so
hard I had to do a parallel install on Solaris because HP-UX (*spit*)
didn't have system call tracing. NetBSD does, so use ktrace/kdump to
figure out what it's trying to find.
 
> I recall that sometime in the distant past I saw someone somewhere referring
> to some compatibility libraries that might be required.  Is this the case?
> I can't even find a man page for compat_osf1.  :-(

I'm guessing it's not a missing library, it's a config file that isn't
located where the tools expect it to be, despite the fact that nobody EVER
said it was supposed to be there or that that file would be needed at all. 

For example, I remember having to fake up an empty INI file just to get
the d*mn things running. This empty INI file wasn't documented ANYWHERE.
 
> I do have COMPAT_OSF1 defined in the kernel config file, and file(1) reports
> that fpsrvadm.exe is 
> 
> COFF format alpha executable paged dynamically linked stripped - version
> 3.11-8
> 
> Is this as it should be?  Where can I look next?

Looks fine. Repeat after me: "System call tracing is my friend."
 
> Any suggestions will be most gratefully received ...

Curse and spit at Microsoft.

Hope against hope that WebDAV support will be added to FrontPage
(it's already in Office 2000) so we can dispense with this madness,
serverside.

Good luck.
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"In feeling small you gain the info you need."
     Ross Smith                                     Apr 22 1999 2:22am