I was asked to assist with troubleshooting a problem. Functionality on a site "stopped working" and I was asked to figure out what is wrong. The following is the error:
FrontPage Error.
User: please report details to this site’s webmaster.
Webmaster: please see the server’s application event log for more details.
On the page I’m seeing the following:
<!--webbot BOT="GeneratedScript" endspan --><form method="POST" action="../_vti_bin/shtml.dll/index.html" name="FrontPage_Form1" onsubmit="return FrontPage_Form1_Validator(this)" language="JavaScript" webbot-action="--WEBBOT-SELF--">
<!--webbot bot="SaveResults" startspan
U-File="/results.csv" S-Format="TEXT/CSV"
S-Label-Fields="FALSE" B-Reverse-Chronology="FALSE" S-Builtin-Fields
S-Form-Fields="TYPE NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP "
U-Confirmation-Url="confirmation.html" --><input TYPE="hidden" NAME="VTI-GROUP" VALUE="0"><!--webbot
bot="SaveResults" endspan i-checksum="43374" -->
<div align="center">
...
I look at the directory structure and find that even after forcing display of hidden directories/files, _vti_bin is GONE. It’s nonexistent. After a little research this leads me to believe that this code is using frontpage extensions, and they have apparently been removed. Does that look accurate?
I’m completely inexperienced with frontpage extensions. Is what this is doing is it’s using another file called shtml.dll and calling it on the path /index.html, basically just doing a postback?
I’m looking at the webbot part which seems to be what it’s trying to accomplish. Is it merely appending the form results to a CSV and that is all?
I see a few other bits like this but they all refer to validators which I should be able to handle in javascript just fine.
I ended up looking at the server configuration and finding that as far as the server was concerned, frontpage extensions were still installed. I then told it to re-install and in the morning it was working again.