NOT SO - Huge Security holes in MS FrontPage 98

[Tony Wilkinson]

Richard,

Firstly, I would like to apologise to those on link who believe
(correctly) that it is not the place for product advertising, or the
overt display of individual baises for or against a vendor.  This is why
I tend to sit quietly and watch most of the time - I can hardly profess
to have an unbiased opinion.  

Having said that, I feel compelled to respond to what appear to be the
quite partizan opinions that are being aired on link.  If such opinions
have been raised, it falls on me to provide the alternate view. So I am
responding to your posting.

Many ISPs around the world have implemented large hosting sites using
Frontpage Extensions and done this successfully - you can find a sample
list of such sites at http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/hosting.htm.

As for NT Server and its ability to function reliably, IDC confirmed
that last year, for the first time, NT Servers outsold all varieties of
Unix servers put together.  This would indicate that a large portion of
the market believes that NT Server does provide a reliable computing
platform.

As for your specific issues with NT Server, I am more than happy to work
with our product support to help you resolve issues that you may have.
As always, we are interested in continually improving the quality of our
products.  If you would like to do this please take this up with me
offline (tonywilk@microsoft.com).

Hopefully I won't need to bore Link too much with my clearly affiliated
views, and we can all enjoy the higher level of non-product-specific
discussion that link is so good at providing :-)

Regards
Tony Wilkinson

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Richard Welykochy [SMTP:rick@dot.net.au]
> Sent:	Wednesday, October 22, 1997 4:02 PM
> To:	link@www.anu.edu.au
> Subject:	Re: NOT SO - Huge Security holes in MS FrontPage 98
> 
> Tony Wilkinson wrote:
> > 
> > For those of you interested in Frontpage Extensions, I should point
> out that
> > Microsoft is aware of the security issue with Apache servers, and
> will be
> > posting an update of Frontpage Extensions for Apache to the
> following
> > location:
> > http://microsoft.com/frontpage/wpp/
> > The security issue ONLY affects Apache based servers and will soon
> be
> > rectified.   This site also includes a lot of useful information for
> those
> > planning to use FP98 Server Extensions
> 
> Allow me to cite the hapless ISP who contributed his experiences
> with the FrontPage Extensions to this list (or another ISP list)
> last year. He stated he mistakenly installed the extensions to make
> one of his dial-up subscribers happy. And whoa! He soon found himself
> spending over 50% of his time trying to support the FPExt, let alone
> run his business.
>  
> Forgive my cynicism, but really, who has time to cater to the
> continuing legacy of bugs, patches, so-called "challenges" and
> fixes that spew forth from Microsoft? We certainly don't!
> 
> [If you want slack 'n' easy plug-in solutions for your dynamic
>  Web needs, you sow what you reap, I suppose.]
> 
> We run umpteen Unix servers with nary a care, and TWO, count'em TWO
> NT boxes. Guess which servers need constant baby-stting, reboots,
> controlled shutdowns etc ;-) Oh, and data loss? Never lost
> anything on a Unix box yet .. NT STILL DROPS FILES! Freezing?
> Well, admittedly, Unix freezes once in a blue moon, and needs
> as reboot. One of NT boxes freezes with the breezes. <SIGH>
> 
> Just think what life would be like if the (lack of) quality that
> seems to apply as a defacto standard to products like Operating
> Systems and Applications Software also applied to industries
> such as medicine, aviation, communications, accounting, or
> the law, to consider a few examples. We'd be running back to our
> caves!  MS has a lot to answer for. Has anyone tried estimating
> the total losses incurred by businesses world-wide due to their
> flakey software? Must add up to $ TRILLIONS ;-]
> 
> 
> L8R
> Richard Welykochy
> 
> Dot Communications Ltd           tel: (02) 9281 1111
> Level 19, 323 Castlereagh St     fax: (02) 9281 2219
> Sydney NSW 2000