The subject of using the colon character in a URL arose after
Jeff Trawick discovered that
such URLs elicit a 403 error on Windows but a 404 error on Unix
platforms. On Windows the colon is forbidden as it is used as
the drive letter separator; there was some discussion about how
the colon could be allowed when passed as PATH_INFO to a PHP
script, for instance.
The APR project, which develops the portability library used
in 2.0, produced a new release this week, version 0.9.4, along
with a redesigned web site
by Justin Erenkrantz. The
APR CVS tree was recently split into two branches; the HEAD of
the tree is working towards a 1.0 release, whereas the 0.9
maintenance branch is kept for backwards-compatible changes
only. The httpd 2.1 (unstable) tree hence uses the HEAD of APR;
the stable 2.0 branch uses the APR 0.9 branch.
Test
tarballs have been made available from the 2.0 tree for
those wishing to test the forthcoming 2.0.48 release. The
developers are hoping to get a few more fixes from the 2.1 tree
tested and back-ported before the official release.
The Register report from the Intel Developer Forum with their
article "Goodbye,
PC; hello, PS (Personal Server)". Intel have a vision that in the
future we will all need to carry around a personal server comprising
of storage, processing, and communications. Their prototype runs an
embedded Linux OS and exports a filesystem via WebDAV using
Apache inside. At Apache Week we think having a few million people
running Apache on a personal server is a good thing; it will certainly
create some great market share stats for Netcraft.
Each month we relay the latest Apache market share statistics from
Netcraft, but we don't need to bother again. Apache now officially
serves 100% of all web sites on the Internet (with a little help from
Verisign). Whilst the controversy over the
decision by Verisign to point all unassigned domain names at its Web
site continues, we like the fact that just about any domain name
you can think of now runs Apache
on Linux. However, when asked by Apache Week, Netcraft founder Mike
Prettejohn told us his survey results now ignore these wildcard
top-level domains. Spoilsport!
Yes, it's time again for that part of the newsletter where we tell
you all about the upcoming ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas and how
you'll really kick yourself if you miss it. Apache Week will be
there, at the Alexis Park Hotel in November, but unlike previous years
we won't be writing much of it up for the newsletter; we'd prefer
to get you to go and register
for the conference and turn up in person. It also means we can spend
our spare evenings in the bar instead of working on Apache Week. The
schedule is now online and includes talks on how the BBC integrated IP
geography systems into Apache 2, how to secure the web server,
everything you want to know about XML parsing, and much more.
In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web
that are of interest to Apache users.
Bradley J. Bartram has advice on "Stress Testing
an Apache Application Server in a Real World Environment". He
covers the tools you need to do the testing, how to set up a test
environment, and how to interpret the results as well as giving a
number of tips for designing dynamic applications.
In the article "Single
Sign-on for Your Web Applications with Apache and Kerberos", Jason
Garman looks at the complicated task of integrating a web server with
Kerberos. He discusses a module that enables Apache to interoperate
with Internet Explorer clients in a Windows domain, transparently
passing their domain credentials through the use of Kerberos, with no
separate username or password prompts.
Finally this week, Jack Wallen shows us how to "Use
Apache's mod_rewrite to make URLs more user friendly", by creating
rules that can hide long path names and scripts.