In this issue

1.0.5 is the current stable public release (it is 1.0.3 plus a security 'fix'). The beta test version, 1.1b, is still at version 2.

RefererIgnore sometimes ignored

The hosts listed on RefererIgnore were sometimes not being ignored. This will be fixed in the next release.

NULL in request field of access log

There has been a report of NULLs appearing in the request field of the access log file. The cause has not been identified, but might be associated with SSI.

URL re-writing

The contributed module mod_rewrite is now updated to work with the 1.1b module API. This module uses a regular-expression parser to re-write requested URLs on the fly. It can also use external databases (either plain text, or DBM) to provide a mapping function.

Ignoring files

The are some files that should probably never be served up to the user: files called .htaccess, .htpasswd, *.pl, *~ and so on. This can be done to some extent in 1.1b using the new handler code:

AddHandler ignore .htaccess
Action ignore /error.cgi

where error.cgi is a script to return an appropriate error (this could be an error document script which handles 404 not found errors, for instance). But this cannot handle arbitary file names (such as *~ and #*#) which require some form of regular expression parsing. Incidently, a regular expression parser might be included in a future release of Apache.

Perl module gets even faster

The perl module, current under development, is getting even faster. It started out fast because it embeds a perl interpreter into Apache, making perl CGI scripts much faster than normal. Now can now be used to speed up your CGI even more, because it can be told to load and run the script just once, when the server starts. Then if a request is received that should be handled by the perl script, mod perl calls a subroutine in the perl script it has already loaded. Besides speeding up perl CGI programs, the fact that the perl script is load and run when Apache starts could be used to (for example) open a connection to a database which is later used by the sub-routines called in response to requests.

In the current version of the code, there are two perl modules. The first incorporates a perl interpreter into an Apache module, which runs perl scripts when requested. The second is "fast" version which (as outlined above) loads and runs a perl script when Apache starts and then calls sub-routines in this script when requested. The code is in an unreleased alpha version.

Apache-SSL/1.0.5+1.0 is now available, using the latest released version of Apache and SSLeay. This is a version of Apache incorporating Secure Socket Layer (SSL), with full source and no export restrictions.

The license terms for FastCGI (a protocol for faster CGI programs -- see last week's Apache Week) have been updated to really say that their code is free.