[Zope] - PCGI with IIS 4.0

[Brian Lloyd]

> > My problem is that lured by the simplicity of getting 
> > pcgi to work on linux/apache I have promised to port 
> > my web app to IIS.
> 
> > I remember that there used to be several references 
> > for getting PCGI to work on IIS, but I can't find 
> > any of them now ;(
> 
> > and the included readme points to 
> > http://starship.skyport.net/crew/jbauer/persistcgi/ 
> > which is also not very helpful for IIS newbie like me
> > (I have no idea how to make IIS execute the info file
> > using pcgi_wrapper.exe, which I guess is the thing I
> > should do)
> 
> Hannu,
> 
> Amos got pcgi-wrapper.exe successfully working with IIS
> back in August.  I'll let him provide the details, then
> I'll add them to the pcgi docs. ;-)
> 
> I think one of the things he did was create a file
> association, .pcgi extensions to pcgi-wrapper.exe.
> 
> The pcgifile.py sanity tester should work (works with
> Win32/Apache) and the pcgitime.py is a good starter
> example to get pcgi working on NT.
> 
> Keep in mind that process creation is more expensive
> on NT vs. Unix.  So although it should work for you,
> it may not sustain heavy loads.  Don't tell us you're
> surprised <wink>.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Jeff Bauer

Note that on winNT Zope also supports an alternate publishing
mechanism that was developed in-house by Digital Creations. 
This mechanism is similar to (but not exactly like) pcgi.
It runs your Zope process as a win32 service, and provides a
lightweight cgi exe which knows how to communicate requests to
the Zope service (the moral equivalent of pcgi-wrapper).

You should be able to install b3 on an NT machine and choose
the
"Install as an NT service and run with my existing web server"
option.

This will install the Zope instance as a service, and prompt you
for a CGI directory into which it will place the cgi exe. Pick 
a directory set up for cgi with IIS when prompted.

Note that you probably have to tweak your IIS configuration to
get IIS to pass authentication headers to Zope. You need to make
sure that BOTH "Windows NT Challenge/Response" AND "Basic
Authentication"
are DESELECTED for the cgi directory where you placed the cgi exe.
Otherwise, IIS will intervene on every request and try to do the
authentication itself (which will fail, of course).

We hope to roll pcgi support into the win32 Zope release soon.


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com