Hi Rick & all, I have a website running a WWC DCOM exe located on another server. The reason being the webserver is replicated and load balanced so we needed to have a single location for the app so we don't have to update it on multiple versions of the web server. (All the sites are on the other location as well). When I set the site up originally I was pointing to a mapped drive to the other location. Now I'm told I shouldn't use the mapped drive, and instead use the UNC for the same location. I changed the location to the UNC of the EXE in all the config files, including wc.ini, my app's ini and web.config, but the APP pool still shows it along the mapped drive path. And so does admin.asp. How can I change the location of the app in the Application pool? Do I delete it and recreate it? I'm assuming that's why admin.asp is seeing it down the drive mapping. Thanks, Rod

Not sure what you mean here. An Application Pools has no location on disk associated with it. The Web Site that uses the an Application Pools does? The application pools is essentially the EXE that gets launched by IIS to host your Web Application(s) that are using that Application Pool. It'll always run on the same machine as the Web server obviously.

+++ Rick ---

Thanks, Rick. My IIS inexperience showing.

Anyway, this is an interesting installation because the new production environment has some sophisticated load balancing. (This server is running multiple other client websites.) My understanding is there are at least 3 replicated IIS web servers in the scheme. To avoid problems with updating sites on replicated servers, all of the sites, including my WCC app EXE and data, are stored on a separate file server accessible over the network and can be called from any of those IIS servers. (I think this takes the place of creating multiple servers in wc.ini. Or at least makes it unnecessary)

It all seemed to be working fine with the site/app locations mapped under a drive letter. When I installed and registered the WWC app in comexp I used the mapped drive path for the app server and all the ini files, temp file locations, etc. I was later informed that I should not use a mapped drive, but rather the UNC location of that server. So I went through and changed all the INIs, web.config, changed the site location on the web server, handler, CGI restrictions. I think everything except re-registering the DCOM server.

I saw in Component Services (MMC comexp.msc /32) that it had the old path. I tried using an /unregserver flag and then tried reinstalling using the full UNC path of the server. But first of all, /unregserver doesn't seem to work. And now the site will not load the server.

I figure it must have to do with this registration, as I have gone over all the rest several times. Any idea how to cleanly unregister the DCOM server and re-register it? I'm hoping that will get me back up and running.

Thanks for any advice.

So further on this, I decided to edit the DCOM server entries in regedit. I searched for all instances of my server name and changed the path to the UNC where applicable. Still no luck. Server will not load. I then went back and tried to use CONSOLE.EXE to re-register the server. It dos not seem to like the length of the UNC on direct entry, so I used the file picker which seemed to work, but when I confirm and click finish I get "File does not exist".

OK I have found info on Remote DCOM servers in the help. Looks like that's the way to go...Will see if I can set that up.

Continuing setting up a remote DCOM server..

I have copied and registered my server (using the same server name as I registered on the webserver). I changed Launch and Access permissions to "everyone". Although I am a domain admin and I am the Application Pool user identity.

I tested the server on the remote server, using the o=CREATEOBJECT("test.testserver") and o.ProcessHit("query_string=wwmaint~Fasthit"). That works. (using my own servername)

Back to the webserver, I am trying o=CREATEOBJECTEX("test.testserver","REMOTESERVER") (using the remote servername) and I get an OLE error, "invalid class string", and can't create the object. That seems to be a VFP fail, somehow...

Remote DCOM is very difficult to set up and keep running. So much so that in fact I wouldn't recommend it. All the systems I've used remote DCOM with would eventually fall over and hang and require hard restarts. Updates were a nightmare. It can be made to work but it's an incredible headache to set up, debug and keep running.

While I'm a big proponent of running Web Connection instances in COM mode, running Remote Instance is not among the recommendations I would make. If you have remote instances my recommendation is to use file based operation with temp files in a shared location on disk. There are other issues that you need to deal with in that scenario (ie. making sure the instances stay up should they crash) but that is

Or use a load balancer to run multiple duplicated instances of sites on multiple servers fronted by the load balancer.

+++ Rick ---

Thanks, Rick.

I think I'll probably move out of this environment and back to my own webserver. It will be a relief.