In this issue

Version 1.1 coming soon: a beta test release will be available from April 22th (or soon after). In the meantime, 1.0.3 is the current stable public release.

As promised last week, a beta test of 1.1 is on the way. It isn't quite ready yet, but it is now being testing by the Apache development group internally. It'll probably be ready for a public beta next week. After 1.1 beta has been tested to death by users, and bugs fixed, there will be final release of the non-beta version 1.1.

The current version 1.1 has some changes in the module API. This means that some existing modules written for current released version may not compile with 1.1. Given the large number of modules around, this is potentially a bad thing. The current plan is to ensure that the non-beta release of 1.1 is fully compatable with the current API. But the beta release will have a different API.

Memory Hog!

The infamous (or not) "memory hog alert!" error message is finally being put out to pasture. This message was put into an early version of the pre-forking Apache to warm of children growing to excessive size and just kind of stayed there. It'll be removed from version 1.1.

Easier Installer

In a move to make configuring and installing apache easier, there has been some discussion of using an auto-configuration tool with Apache. This could checkout your operating system and set things up for a smooth compilation, and allow you to select modules to compile it. This isn't going to be in the beta release.

Password creator for mod_digest

Apache includes a module to allow 'digest' authentication. There is now a tool called htdigest which does for digest authentication what htpasswd does for basic authentication.

Socket accept errors

Many users of Apache will see the "Socket error: accept failed" error message in the error log. This is probably caused by a user connecting, then disconnecting before Apache gets a chance to respond. This is more likely to happen when the network is heavily loaded because of extra delays in getting across the network.

PHP Module

The next release of the server-parsed-HTML processor PHP/FI will include an Apache interface module. Since PHP can already talk to mSQL and Postgres95 databases, and Illustra is in the works, Apache and PHP could make a good base for an efficient web server/relational database combination. The Apache module will be in release 1.99l of PHP/FI.