MV 3.12 problems with Win95. Must I switch to NT or Linux?

[Joe Mazz <joemazz@earthlink.net>]

******    message to minivend-users from Joe Mazz <joemazz@earthlink.net>     ******

Dear Minivend gurus,

I am running Apache 1.3.6 for Win32  and Perl 5.005_02  (ActiveState binary build 509, which includes the
recommended "standard" Perl distribution features for Win32) on a 233MHz Pentium/MMX  running
Windows 95. I was successfully using this as a development platform with Minivend 3.11 for a few weeks
with no problems. However, after installing and running 'makecat' for the 'simple' demo with the upgraded
Minivend 3.12, I have been having  the following problems:

In Netscape, after clicking "frames" (http://localhost/cgi-bin/simple.exe/frames) or "noframes" (http://localhost/cgi-bin/simple/noframes), instead of the generated HTML displaying in
the browser, the "Save As..." dialog pops up. It is as if Netscape does not understand that the
output from simple.exe is HTML (an incorrect header?). I have tweaked the various options in
httpd.conf, but it does not make a difference. Also, I did not change mime.types from their defaults
No errors showed up in httpd's error_log or in the shell running "minivend -serve".
If I save the results to disk and look at it in Netscape from disk, it looks like normal HTML and
appears fine in the browser, so simple.exe appears  to be doing its job.

With MSIE 4.0, I get a different behavior. Instead of "Save As..." popping up, it waits for a reply
for about 30 seconds, and then minivend shell complains repeatedly as follows:
   " WARNING: POSSIBLE BAD ROBOT. 115 accesses with no 30 second pause."
And then httpd's error_log includes the following:
   " Premature end of script headers: c:/apps/apachegroup/apache/cgi-bin/simple.exe"

Is anyone running Minivend 3.12 successfully on Windows95/98 or NT for development,
or is UNIX the platform of choice? A survey of platforms (OS, HTTP server and version, and Perl version)
being used by Minivend 3.12 catalog developers would be very helpful to newbies like myself.

Why can Windows 95+Perl+Apache for Win32 handle Minivend 3.11 but not 3.12
(even the non-framed version of the 'simple' demo)?

I plan to deploy the catalog on an ISP running Linux for its robustness over NT, but I prefer the
Windows environment for development convenience if possible. I dislike having to boot
Windows to use Dreamweaver, Excel, etc., and reboot with Linux just to modify
Minivend tags and test the catalog configurations.

Are there revisions I can make to my Windows 95 set-up to make this work, or should I give it up and
develop on Linux for Minivend? Or is an upgrade to Windows NT workstation 4 all I need to stay with Win32?

BTW, I did search the mail server and the FAQ and found references to the robot and premature end
of header problem, but no concrete SOLUTION seems to be posted.

Any suggestions will be *greatly* appreciated.

Thanks for the great Minivend tool, and for this useful mail list.

Regards,
Joe


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