SUMMARY: Web dev shop

[Beth Tang]

Thank you all for your helpful responses to my question.  The original one
was:

> A friend just asked me a question about optimal set up for a Windows/NT
> shop using IIS.  They are wondering about web development and hosting
> set-up. It's a bit beyond me, so I'm hoping to tap the collective wisdom
> of the list.  What devices and procedures are recommended, either based on
> experience or according to a recent article?  Do you mirror a site for
> fault tolerance?  What is the best arrangement (not necessarily physical)
> of the hardware, i.e., testing/staging/production servers?
> 
Responses follow:

1.  I work in an NT-only shop (customer has an agreement with MS).  We
handle both the Intranet and the Internet sites.  All of our machines are
IIS4, SP5 (I don't think SP6 is stable yet), have people develop (using
FrontPage 2000 or FTPing files to the server) on a development-only server,
the files are transferred to a staging server that is a full backup of the
production server used to verify that something will work correctly on the
live server (files are tested for broken links and ADA compliance on this
server as well), then the files are moved to the production server.  I don't
think we have any active mirrors set up, we're still working on getting the
development-staging-production scheme completely up and running.  One thing
to be absolutely certain of when using NT/IIS is to keep your security
patches up to date -- once it's listed on
http://www.microsoft.com/security/, expect someone to try to break into your
server exploiting it.

I can't give more specifics, because I'm a developer, not an administrator.
:)  We've got a team of administrators and operations folks handling the
servers themselves.  The customer has someone who understands this stuff as
the central point of authority, but our team does most of the actual work.

2.  I'm fond of NT for the server, but NOT of IIS.  Unless they're
unalterably committed to it for some reason, I'd hope they'd look at
alternatives such as WebSite, even if they don't choose to use them.

-Beth Tang
tangb at calib.com