[Zope] Zope, IIS, one designer and one admin

[Jeffrey Robinson]

Hello;

Currently my workplace is experimenting with using Zope (on NT) to serve or
corporate Intranet.  For the last while we've been prototyping everything on
a test-server for now in a self-contained way (using ZServer to dish up the
pages).

Now we are taking a second step and trying to test Zope using IIS (version
4, I believe) to act as the webserver using pcgi.  This is where things
begin to get a bit sticky as I've got a reasonable amount of familiarity
with Zope now, but almost none with NTServer or IIS.

Working with our Admin, we went through the instructions of configuring
Zope/IIS though still seem to be running into problems.  (The available
document, the IIS How-To on Zope.org is a bit dated, perhaps?  A few of the
steps differ from the ones we had to perform on our server; such as the
location of the registry key we had to edit, etc).

One of the items that troubles me is that perhaps I've also complicated
issues by using an external version of Python (we needed to install the
win32 Python extensions for some of our Zope products, which in turn
required an external version of python), so I don't absolutely know if our
configuration is correct or not!

The info in our Zope.pcgi file is as follows:

PCGI_NAME=Zope
PCGI_PORT=8090
#PCGI_MODULE_PATH=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\lib\python\Zope
PCGI_MODULE_PATH=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\lib\python\Main.py
PCGI_PUBLISHER=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\pcgi\pcgi_publisher.py
PCGI_EXE=C:\Progra~1\python21\python.exe
PCGI_SOCKET_FILE=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\var\pcgi.soc
PCGI_PID_FILE=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\var\pcgi.pid
PCGI_ERROR_LOG=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet\var\pcgi.log
PCGI_DISPLAY_ERRORS=1
BOBO_REALM=Zope
BOBO_DEBUG_MODE=1
INSTANCE_HOME=C:\Progra~1\MCIInternet

(The change in the PCGI_MODULE_PATH was made after the test on Zope.pcgi
failed, and other examples showed it pointing to Main.py instead... the
python\Zope directory is empty in my installation).

If we try to access Zope via http://webtest/cgi-bin/Zope.pcgi without Zope
running we get an error from Zope.pcgi that indicates it is working
correctly on that end.  When we start Zope and try to access it we typically
get an error message on the Zope console (CMD/DOS-Window).  Then it usually
starts a pcgi-wrapper.exe process which then sits around using 99% of the
CPU and can't be killed by an 'End Task'.

Unfortunately, this seems to be doing little to gain the confidence of the
Admin I am working with (he distrusts the lack of "available
documentation").  I'd like to be able to pinpoint where the problem is
without having to constantly bother the admin over and over again to try
different options, just to ease aggravation.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Jeff Robinson
Graphic Designer
Motor Coach Industries