Apache Week issue 310
Apache Week <[email protected]> Fri, 27 Sep 2002 17:33:56 +0200
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.apache.apacheweek |
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APACHE WEEK
The essential weekly guide for users of the world's most popular Web server.
Issue 310: 27th September 2002
In this issue
* Apache 2.0.42 Released
* Under development
* Featured articles
* Apache Week giveaway
Apache 2.0.42 Released
Apache 2.0.42 was released on 24^th September 2002 and is now the
latest version of the Apache server. This is the fifth stable
release of Apache 2.0, following up on 2.0.40 which was released on
9^th August 2002. Read our [1]special feature for more information
about the history of Apache 2.0.
Apache 2.0.42 is available in source form for compiling on Unix or
Windows, for download from the [2]main Apache site or from any
[3]mirror download site.
This is mainly a bug-fix release with a few new features. Users
should upgrade if they will be affected by the particular bugs
mentioned below or would like to use any of the new features.
Security fixes
The security fixes in this release are:
* Fix a segfault in mod_dav if a particular OPTIONS request is
received for a DAV-enabled location, where a DAV repository is
configured which does not support versioning (such as that
provided by mod_dav_fs).
Users of thread-based MPMs on Unix platforms such as worker should
be aware that a segfault in a single worker thread will terminate
all other worker threads within that process; segfaults which can
be triggered remotely allow a Denial of Service attack in such
configurations.
New features
The new features in this release are:
* A new directive, AddOutputFilterByType, was added to make it
possible to add multiple filters per directive.
* Include directives may now have wildcards in the final part of the
path.
* Fixes for mod_cache to ensure that cache file names are chosen
which are unique for all virtual hosts and query arguments.
* A new directive, ModMimeUsePathInfo, can be used to make mod_mime
consider the path info component of URIs.
* mod_cache now has support for caching streamed responses such as
proxy or CGI responses. A new directive, CacheMaxStreamingBuffer,
was added to tune this behaviour.
* The experimental leader/followers MPM was restored to working
condition and its thread synchronization method was changed.
* Add BufferedLogs directive to enable or disable buffered server
logs at run-time. Add support for third party modules to handle
writes to log files.
* The ServerTokens has a new maj option to only show the major
version.
* The performance of keepalive requests was improved.
Bug Fixes
The bugs fixed in this release include:
* Segmentation faults were fixed in mod_cache and mod_env.
* Memory leaks were plugged in the server core and in the chunking
code.
* Parsing of the protocol version (e.g. HTTP/1.1) in the request
line is now case insensitive.
* mod_disk_cache's generation of 304s was fixed. The module as a
whole is much improved, although it must still be considered
experimental.
* mod_cache now does not cache responses to GET requests with URLs
containing a query segment unless the origin server explicitly
provides an Expires header on the response.
* The operation of FileETags none was fixed. [4]BZ#12207
* mod_rewrite was changed to use apr-util's database support for
database rewrite maps. The database type (e.g. ndbm, gdbm) can now
be specified in the RewriteMap directive. [5]BZ#10644
* mod_rewrite's prg: support was fixed so that request/response
pairs no longer get out of sync with each other. [6]BZ#9534
* Various tweaks were made to mod_rewrite's cookie support: they may
now be set on errors, the correct expiry date is used, logging was
improved, and the path can now be set. [7]BZ#12132, [8]BZ#12181,
[9]BZ#12172
* mod_ext_filter's handling of quoted and escaped command args was
fixed. [10]BZ#11793
* mod_proxy now handles proxied responses with no status line.
* The message printed when a module is rejected due to
incompatibility now prints the actual version number of the failed
module and the server. [11]BZ#11213
* mod_proxy_ftp was made thread-safe.
* Fix logic to prevent non-HTML files from being compressed by
mod_deflate.
* The content-length filter no longer tries to buffer up the entire
output of a long-running request before sending anything to the
client.
* The unused CacheOn directive was removed.
Platform-specific changes
The following platform-specific changes have been made:
* The default stack size was decreased on Win32 to allow around 8000
threads to be started per child process.
* The ThreadLimit directive was added to the Windows MPM.
* A bug was fixed whereby environment or command line arguments
containing non-ASCII-7 characters would cause the child process
creation to fail on Win32. [12]BZ#11854
Under development
Following the 2.0.42 release this week, a 1.3.27 release is due
soon. No major changes have been made since the last 1.3 release;
some protocol checks have been relaxed, several platform-specific
fixes are included notably adding support for Caldera OpenUNIX 8,
and a few minor bugs have been fixed.
There was some discussion on the development list concerning the
potential advantages of a 2.0 filter module which strips
unnecessary whitespace and comments from HTML content being served.
Several developers felt this was of limited benefit; the mod_gzip
module being a better way of saving bandwidth. [13]Jeff Trawick
noted that the mod_ext_filter module could already be used to do
this by filtering content through an external program such as
[14]HTML Tidy, however this would add a lot of overhead to the
server.
Featured articles
In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that
are of interest to Apache users.
Sys Admin magazine presents [15]"Using Oracle with Apache and PHP
on Linux" which shows you how to access an Oracle database via PHP
running on an Apache web server. The versions of softwares used in
the examples are Red Hat 7.3, Apache 1.3.23, PHP 4.1.2, and Oracle
9i (9.0.1.0.0.).
The Developer Shed continues with the fourth installment of the
series on Web applications entitled "The Art Of Software
Development". [16]"Delivering Quality" fills the gap between the
completion of coding and the delivery of the software to the
customer. The list of tasks to be completed includes developing
suitable test cases for unit, system, and acceptance testing,
preparing a detailed test plan, testing and debugging the software,
and preparing the documentation such as the user manual,
developer's guide, and API specifications.
[17]"Moodss - Modular Administration" talks about the Modular
Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet (Moodss) which is a freely
downloadable graphical monitoring application. Currently there are
34 modules available which can be loaded to monitor any sort of
data, from monitoring network activity to monitoring an Apache web
server with a MySQL database as the data provider for the dynamic
pages.
Apache Week giveaway
We received just under 400 entries to our recent competition,
although 6 of those were spam and two people thought that the M in
XML stood for Microsoft. The right answer was of course "Markup",
so congratulations to the two lucky winners chosen at random; Tom
Caldwell and Francis Lee - your books will be in the post.
Read the [18]Apache Week review of Professional PHP4 XML and look
out for more book competitions and reviews coming soon.
______________________________________________________________
This issue brought to you by: Gary Benson, Mark J Cox, Joe Orton,
Min Min Tsan
Comments or criticisms? Please email us at
[19][email protected].
[20]Apache Week is copyright 1996-2002 by [21]Red Hat, Inc.
References
1. http://www.apacheweek.com/features/ap2
2. http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/
3. http://www.apache.org/mirrors/
4. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12207
5. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10644
6. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9534
7. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12132
8. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12181
9. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12172
10. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11793
11. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11213
12. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11854
13. http://httpd.apache.org/contributors/#trawick
14. http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
15. http://www.samag.com/documents/s=7610/sam0210a/0210a.htm
16. http://www.devshed.com/Talk/Practices/SoftwareDev/SoftwareDev4/page1.html
17. http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=7460/uni1032274643179/ur0209i.htm
18. http://www.apacheweek.com/features/book-prophp4xml
19. mailto:[email protected]
20. http://www.apacheweek.com/
21. http://www.redhat.com/
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