Hi all,
Excuse this if anyone else has figured this out and I've
overlooked it but I've just worked out a niggling problem with packaged
power point files in BB6.0.10_40+hf11 (win2k+mssql).
The problem I was having was basically that they just didn't work and
the browser always returned a 404 when you accessed the packaged
material in the course documents of a course! However it seems that the
problem lies with naming convention of the folder the unpackaged content
resides in as opposed to blackboard not being able to find the file
(hence a 404). You'll notice that in the respective numbered directory,
in the content directory of the course with the packaged file in, is a
folder marked "dir_" followed by the name of the original package file.
So for example if we upload "example.zip" we would have a directory
called "dir_example.zip". When Blackboard references this as a url link
it does this like so:
http://<rest of url>/dir_example.zip/packagedhtmlfirstpage.html
and this url causes a rejected request (hence the 404) in urlscan due to
the "." in the ".zip". I have asked blackboard if they will:
"please please please, change the un-packaging system so that unpackaged
folders are written to a directory that is either "not" the name of the
package file with "dir_" as a prefix, or name it something else, like a
number!"
In the meantime you can resolve this (but potentially make IIS slightly
more insecure) by changing the settings of urlscan. In the standard
urlscan directory (C:\winnt\inetsrv\urlscan\) I have changed the
urlscan.ini so that in the section marked:
[OPTIONS]
the line:
AllowDotInPath=0 ; if 1, allow dots that are not file extensions
Now reads
AllowDotInPath=1 ; if 1, allow dots that are not file extensions
This gets around the problem of the unpackaged folder path having a "."
in it, so the fact that "example.zip" appears half way through the path
is ignored.
Andrew
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