Relationship graphs on Windows/IIS

[mmchenry]

Has anyone ever gotten relationship graphs to work on Windows/IIS? Every few month I'll give it another try and can never seem to get anywhere. I've installed WinGraphviz and enabled relationship graphs, but it never works. I always get an access violation like "PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C82F350" and no graph is displayed.

It will work if I disable anonymous access in IIS and authenticate with an administrator account when accessing the Mantis site. It just won't work if anonymous access is enabled in IIS (which of course is the desired configuration). Is WinGraphviz creating a temp file somewhere? Maybe the IIS anonymous account needs write permissions to a folder somewhere? Or maybe the account needs some privilege it doesn't normally have?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mantis 1.1.2
PHP 4.3.11
MySQL 4.1.4
Windows 2003 & IIS

[mmchenry]

I just ran procmon to see if I could figure out what's going on. Turns out WinGraphviz needs write access to the root of the Windows volume (C:\ in this case). It tried to create a file "C:\t73k" which I presume is the graph itself.

It's pretty shocking that a component designed to be used on servers would need write access to the root of the system volume. It's not like it's hard to get the location of the temp folder in Windows.

So anyway, I gave write and delete permissions in the root folder to the IIS anonymous user and it works now. It's just an internal departmental server, so I'm not really worried about the security implications. But for anyone running a public or large scale enterprise server, this is clearly unacceptable.

I don't think the original author of WinGraphviz is actively maintaining it anymore, so I doubt it's going to be fixed.