Hi all --

1st off - this is a great forum and a great resource - thanks to all who run this.

I've done a ton of ASP/SQL deverlopment work over the last few years and naturally been working on Windows servers.

Recently, been getting quite tired of the frequent downtime, Imail getting registry corruption and all the now famous windows environment "challenges".

Looking to move to FreeBSD ( seems to be the favorite flavor ) or something similar and do some PHP/mySQL work.

A few questions for you gurus out there:

1) Site search engine. IIS has built in indexing. Is there something similar to this ? For both static and dynamic pages.

2) Been using ASPMail. What's the best one on *nix, Sendmail ?

3) Staging -> Production. Is there a good php script or app that "pushes" tested content onto a production site.

4) Imail replacement. Having web based access to POP accounts is nice -- what's the best freeBSD version ?

5) Email newsletter / promo system. I have an ASP/SQL app that runs our monthly promotion system with subscribe/unsubscribe and forward-to-a-friend features. I'm starting to look at PHP-Nuke -- any others recommendations for this ? free or commerical.

6) Any recommendation on a shared account host who will make things easy.

thanks !

^bump^

bah, wait longer than 9 minutes before bumping...someone will answer soon enough :)

hey tagalaxy --

i actually waited over 12hrs ( the time was from AM to PM ) -- but no biggie :)

still no replies -- anyone recommend any sources ? or am I back to google searching my way though all these issues ? :)

ah, so you did...call me blind then :D
if you arent getting any luck here, google is always a good bet....or you could try the forums at bravenet.com, there are usually a fair few knowledgable people on there :)

For a site search engine I think you will have to use a script that parses every page manually, this is slow...I dont think apache has indexing, or does it?

thanks for the tips.

so far I've found the Apache doesn't index automatically, but there are a bunch of modules for it:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#search

anyone recommend a particular one ?

One thing I'm finding in the linux world is that are a TON of options VS the msft world -- which is good in the long run but takes a while to sift through :)

cheers!