Deleting _vti_cnf directories recursively

There are a number of issues concerning Drupal sites suddenly or slowly becoming broken along with error messages that have "_vti" as part of the issue. The certain themes (such as Multi-Flex) will definitely break the entire Drupal site if FrontPage Extensions are turned on, on a site. This is because the FrontPage extensions are somehow creating shortcuts in a directory that is parsed first before the main site files are parsed.

Some web hosts often set up new accounts on Linux/Apache based servers with FrontPage extensions already loaded by default. The reason they do this is NOT because they assume you will use FrontPage. It is because they are using a shortcut to allow a web developer using Windows to make "a new Network place" to drag files up onto the web server from the desktop. I guess over time someone got the "bright" idea to pre-load the extensions for whatever reason.

Once FrontPage extensions are REMOVED from the site and "cleaned up" any "My Network Places" shortcuts to the site may break because FrontPage is providing some kind of convenient WebDav backdoor to get into a site. In that case, on a PC running Windows you would have to make a new Network Place using the format of "ftp://www.mydomainname.com/ and fill in username an password in order to have the ability to get into the webhosting server from your desktop without using a specialized ftp program such as CuteFTP or Dreamweaver etc.

Once FrontPage extensions are removed, the site will work fine. We did have to go into our MySql database usiing PHPMyAdmin and search for instances of " vti " and remove them from the database, but once that was done, the sites we broke so completely came back to life instantly.

You can easily get rid of "_vti_cnf" directories by running the following command in SSH:

find . -depth -type d -name _notes -o -name _vti_cnf | xargs rm -rf