In this issue

A controversial patch was submitted this week, to allow the DocumentRoot directive to be used within a <Location> block. Part of the motivation for this change was to allow the DocumentRoot to be "unset" for a particular location, to prevent any files being served from the filesystem within this portion of the URL space. It was revealed that a new hook available in 2.0 already allows module authors to implement this behaviour, and some list members felt that this patch was unnecessary.

A new directive LogExcludeByType was added to the 2.0 tree; this directive would disable logging of requests for files which matched certain MIME types. This was added to overcome performance problems with using the existing methods of performing conditional logging, using SetEnvIf and CustomLog. After several comments that the directive was too specific, the commit was reverted pending broader consensus.

Debugging continued of the problem with high load averages generated by 2.0 on the live server running at apache.org. Despite a great deal of analysis the developers seem no closer to finding the solution.

Russell Pavlicek at InfoWorld gives his predictions for the future of open source in 2002. Amongst great things happening to Linux, Russell predicts that Apache will finally be recognised as the de facto standard in web servers.

"The shortcomings of Microsoft's IIS will help spur Apache's rise, which should also be bolstered by Gartner's recent recommendation to abandon the use of IIS as a corporate Web server."

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

In this final installment of the series on Apache web serving with Mac OS X, Kevin Hemenway shows you how to enable PHP support, test that it is working, retrieve useful information from the error log, and use the Order, Deny, and Allow directives to restrict access to your intranet. For the ambitious who wish to implement a web-based POP email client using PHP, he recommends PHPost. Due to the overwhelming responses from Mac OS X users, we heard from the man himself that he plans to add two new articles to the original three in this series. Isn't this good news?

As high-availability is critical for centralised authentication and password services, "Non-stop authentication with Linux clusters" guides you in creating a reliable, highly available authentication server using the OpenLDAP and Heartbeat packages on a pair of Linux servers. It explains the basic concepts of LDAP and Heartbeat, and then proceeds to give a detailed description on configuring and testing the setup. An example of how to configure the Apache Web server with mod_auth_ldap to authenticate users against the LDAP server is included at the end of this article.

RMI (Remote Method Invocation) allows the methods of remote Java objects to be invoked from other Java virtual machines. If an RMI client is blocked by a firewall, one solution is to use HTTP tunneling to reach the RMI server. "10 Steps to RMI Tunnelling" by David M. Howard is a step-by-step tutorial on how to implement Sun's RMI servlet handler in Apache+Tomcat so that the web server will forward RMI requests to the local RMI server correctly.