Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Web Server Stopping

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Web Server Stopping

    I've had a couple of apps running for years using the Alpha Web Server installed on a Windows Server.
    Both apps have their own server and instance of the Alpha Web Server.
    The servers are VMs hosted with the same hosting provider.
    On each server I use AlwaysUp to maintain uptime, and historically this has worked well.

    In recent weeks I've had a few occasions where the apps are unreachable via a browser, which times out. This happens for both apps, and at this point it appears to be at the same time.

    I each case, AlwaysUp shows the Alpha Web Server as running, but to fix the issue I have to at least stop and restart the Alpha Web Server, if not restart the Windows Server.

    Not sure why this issue has suddenly started or if anyone else is having similar issues. Any ideas?




    #2
    Turn on the app server logs. Next time it happens check the logs and check for dump files. Are you on a more recent version? There is an option to report the HTTP log only during an error. I'd select that option.
    Mike Brown - Contact Me
    Programmatic Technologies, LLC
    Programmatic-Technologies.com
    Independent Developer & Consultant​​

    Comment


      #3
      I have an app that is behaving similarly - restarting the app (or the server) always helps. I haven't taken the time to figure it out yet - but the suggestion above is solid.

      Please let me know what you find out.

      I figure it's some bad actor pinging the server for weaknesses until the server gives up. I've found that the longer I let the server stay down before restarting it, the longer it takes the crash the next time. Presumably because the bad actor gives up for a bit when it can't reach the server for an extended time.

      But that is just a guess.

      Comment


        #4
        That is one reason to have Cloudflare as front proxy with Alphas classic server. I would not run Alpha without Cloudflare anymore. It adds security but Cloudflare is full of extra features. Just one example I did have very hard time with CORS preflight reguests with Alpha server and did not get it work at all but with Cloudflare if was possible because I could use Cloudflares Transform rules to add headers to Alphas response as needed. Now preflight request works.

        Comment


          #5
          I am having similar issues. Restarting the instance fixes it. I have not used Cloud flare, but heard about it, and I am interested. What does cloud flare do that might take care of this issue?
          Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.

          Comment


            #6
            Cloudflare is dedicated platform to protect domains automatically. And it gives to you many toolsets to do something special that maybe works for you.

            When you switch to Cloudflare It is good to understand that you need to hide your IP first. Cloudflare protects your domain not your IP. So if your IP is known you can't protect your server with Coudflare or without Cloudflare. So take fresh IP, point your domain to it and configure Cloudflare to protect it and then start your server. Now your IP is hidden and Cloudflare can do what it can. (Normally you put an empty site to point directly to your IP address for example you can do this with IIS but with Alpha Classic server this is unfortunately not possible.)

            Comment


              #7
              Keep in mind that people will not be able to reach your website without access to your ip.
              Gregg
              https://paiza.io is a great site to test and share sql code

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by madtowng View Post
                Keep in mind that people will not be able to reach your website without access to your ip.
                Luckily this is not true. Hole web would be in chaos.

                Cloudflare is a proxy. People see Cloudflare proxy IP which can be different each time. Cloudflare will forward web traffic to your server. Only one that can connect directly to your server using domain (yoursite.com) is Cloudflare.

                But this is not case with IP. Cloudflare cannot protect it. Because in Alpha Classic server you cannot put empty site (Alpha has not multiple site support) pointing directly to your server IP, some https robots (good and bad) will eventually find your site. And now somebody knows…This is a big problem with Alpha.

                Comment


                  #9
                  kkfin - you can easily run multiple sites on Alpha Server.

                  You simply point all the sites to the same IP and the same index page.

                  On that index page, you will receive the calling URL and then forward that calling URL to the correct login page.

                  so your index.a5w page will be:

                  if callingurl = "mysite1.com" then

                  response.redirect("mysite1.com/mysite1/login.a5w")

                  end if

                  In the case above, each site is in it's own subdirectory under a5webroot.

                  If they all need to be secure, you can run multiple instances of Alpha on multiple ports - one for each site - and point also to the correct port.

                  It's a bit of a pain to setup that way, but it gets the job done.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by lgrupido View Post
                    kkfin - you can easily run multiple sites on Alpha Server.

                    You simply point all the sites to the same IP and the same index page.

                    On that index page, you will receive the calling URL and then forward that calling URL to the correct login page.

                    so your index.a5w page will be:

                    if callingurl = "mysite1.com" then

                    response.redirect("mysite1.com/mysite1/login.a5w")

                    end if

                    In the case above, each site is in it's own subdirectory under a5webroot.

                    If they all need to be secure, you can run multiple instances of Alpha on multiple ports - one for each site - and point also to the correct port.

                    It's a bit of a pain to setup that way, but it gets the job done.
                    Yes I know all this but this is not a multisite support. What you need is totally empty site bind to your IP address. The empty site is active when somebody use IP to connect to your server. So user will get no information of your server. Just empty site. So user will not know who runs and what in the server. It is empty site. Then when somebody use domain (yoursite.com) then connection is made to your actual site in this same server secured by Cloudflare and user will not know your IP at all. It is Cloudflare IP user will see.

                    Alpha does not has this feature but for example IIS has. This is a big difference compared what you suggested.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X