Apache question revisited

Friday, July 06, 2007 by Dave Winer.

In June I outlined a problem I was having with the content system for Scripting News. Writing to a folder served by Apache for Windows was a problem, every few saves it would fail, leaving the site unusable until I manually restarted Apache. 

A bunch of people suggested the problem would go away if I moved the static site to a different server from the content system. So I tried that a few days ago, but the problem followed. 

Then yesterday I tried switching my transfer method from file-writing to FTP, and voila, the problem is gone. Every save (knock wood) seems to make it to the static folder without error. I guess the key is that the FTP server, since it was written by Microsoft, comes into the file system at such a low level that it can always write a file no matter what other apps think about it. I don't know and don't really care, as long as it works, which it does. Whew.