DesignBais Connection Issue Solved

I just had a situation with DesignBais connecting to two servers. Huh?  Problem solved!

I have two systems for primary development and testing – I’ll call them Sys1 and Sys2. I have a Favorites link setup to go to http://Sys1/dev2. I have other links for Sys1/db2, Sys2/test1, etc… When I clicked on my Favorites link for Sys1/db2, as expected, I would get prompted for a user/password for the DesignBais webmain.asp page. But then I got another prompt to access Sys2.

I checked DBSysMan and the Configuration Editor. I checked the debug files. I manually checked DesignBais XML files. I looked through every file in my DBILOGIN and my development account for references to Sys2. I found nothing that even referred to Sys2.

In desperation I did a search of my entire C: hard drive for any files that contained the text "Sys2" (it’s good to have unique hostnames just for situations like this. A very unusual file came up in the results: Favorites\Links\DBSys1.url. Now why would a URL file for Sys1 in any way refer to Sys2?

I opened the file in an editor and here’s what it contains:

[DEFAULT]BASEURL=http://sys2/test1/webmain.asp
[DOC_hor#5]BASEURL=http://sys2/test1/fmenutop.asp
ORIGURL=fmenuTop.asp
[DOC_hor_ver_b]BASEURL=http://sys2/test1/fmenutree.asp
ORIGURL=fmenuTree.asp
[InternetShortcut]URL=http://sys1/dev2
Modified=A02BFF87C19FC70179

Holy cow! I had copied my Internet Explorer Favorites from Sys2 to Sys1 to keep them in sync. When I added the Sys2/test1 webmain page, it copied the URLs to the frames within that page. When I copied the links to Sys1 I renamed the link and changed the URL so it would refer to the local Sys1 system. But nowhere in the right-click / Properties page does it show all of those frame references, only the URL to the main form. So when I connected to sys1/dev2, that frame container then tried to load the frames from sys2/test1. I only found this problem when I was using sys1 off the network. If sys2 was readily accessible I never would have known what was happening – and in fact I was running like this for about a month and I didn’t have a clue.

The morals of the story
1) beware of moving Favorites from one system to another, and
2) this problem really had nothing to do with DesignBais – don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions about where the problem lies until more investigation has been done.

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