Bizarre ASP/Access instructions
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In the support section on http://brinkster.com :
How can you keep unwanted people from downloading your database simply by typing in the url? You can't, it is not possible. BUT you can secure it by adding a password to it.
Not being a Windows person, I'm not sure, but this can't POSSIBLY be the case, can it? What's WRONG with these people?!
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Simple. In order to access a database, it must sit within the folder(s)
that contain your web page's HTML. You mean you didn't know that...?
At least, that's how they think it works. You should be able to put the
database anywhere, even on another computer. Anyone who says
differently is clearly not qualified to answer the question. And with
some kinds of databases, you
can't actually access the database with the path to the files where the
data resides. These are generally the kinds of databases that you would
want your website running off of.
Unless you enjoy the pain of running your website with an Access database.
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@Mike R said:
Simple. In order to access a database, it must sit within the folder(s)
that contain your web page's HTML. You mean you didn't know that...?
At least, that's how they think it works. You should be able to put the
database anywhere, even on another computer. Anyone who says
differently is clearly not qualified to answer the question. And with
some kinds of databases, you
can't actually access the database with the path to the files where the
data resides. These are generally the kinds of databases that you would
want your website running off of.
Unless you enjoy the pain of running your website with an Access database.
So, first, they don't allow you to put the database elsewhere. Then
they don't let you tell IIS not to allow it to be downloaded (I assume
IIS has a .htaccess equivalent).
I must say I was slighly amazed (not to say nauseated) when I first
discovered there was such a thing as an Access-based website. I'm more
used to MySQL, PostGres and, occasionally, Oracle(yuk).
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@epelo said:
No, it's not the case. You can stop IIS from
serving certain filetypes when requested. It seems they are just too
lazy to set it up for access db...
But the user can't do that themself?
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@rsynnott said:
@epelo said:
No, it's not the case. You can stop IIS from serving certain filetypes when requested. It seems they are just too lazy to set it up for access db...
But the user can't do that themself?I'm not sure about the latest IIS (6.0) that can be configured by editing XML-file(s), but I'm under the impression that IIS do not support Apache's kind of user configuration files (.htaccess).
I wouldn't recommend it, but you can edit IIS configuration from ASP script, so you could make a page that allows users to modify IIS from web or their own scripts…
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@rsynnott said:
So, first, they don't allow you to put the database elsewhere. Then
they don't let you tell IIS not to allow it to be downloaded (I assume
IIS has a .htaccess equivalent).
I must say I was slighly amazed (not to say nauseated) when I first
discovered there was such a thing as an Access-based website. I'm more
used to MySQL, PostGres and, occasionally, Oracle(yuk).
Hmm, They should at least have a separate area for data, using a
symlink, or possibly splitting your home directory up into 2 sides:
/data and /www ... Probably the latter, since it's windows, But then
configuring IIS would be more difficult on their side, they would have
to add a web for each user, instead of adding a user/password to the
ftp server, and dumping a directory in some /users folder.. Either that
or <gasp> setting up SQL Server and creating the user's own
personal database. Its simple to do, and could be automated.
Any website I've done that requires a database has been MySQL or SQL Server.