In this issue

Release: 1.1.3 (Released 14th January 1997)
Beta: 1.2b10 (Released 30th April 1997)

• RFC1413 ident checking uses a timeout which overrides the timeout already set by Apache for handling the response, possibly leading to connections which never timeout.
• If an error occurs creating a response Apache returns response headers that relate to the requested resource, not the returned error message or document.
• The dynamic loading module, mod_dld, is now out-of-date with respect to the rest of Apache, so should be used with care.
• Building Apache in HPUX 10 can fail, if you are using the HPUX ANSI compiler. This is because it requires additional arguments (-Ae -D_HPUX_SOURCE) which are automatically added if the compiler is configured on the CC line of Configuration, but not if the compiler is found by Configure. (Note: HPUX ships with a compiler which does not handle ANSI C code. This will not work with Apache - either buy the HPUX ANSI C compiler, or download and use gcc).
• On Solaris 2, Apache cannot handle more than about 128 virtual hosts. This is because Solaris 2 can only open 255 file pointers (even if the number of file descriptors is increased). This is a known limitation of Solaris 2, and is not related to Apache. However there will probably be a patch containing a work-around for this available soon, but it will not be part of Apache 1.2.

Bugs fixed in next release:

• The status module displays URLs without escaping HTML codes (e.g. <), which can lead to corrupt display.
• A default virtual host for a specific port number, _default_:port did not work properly. Note that if you want your default virtual host to handle requests on all ports, you should use, use _default_:*.
• If no DefaultType directive is given, Apache does not send a Content-Type response header. Also the srm-conf.dist file indicates that the default type if none is available is text/plain, however Apache was using text/html. If now uses text/plain.
• If a file exists but is not readable by the server process, the response includes details of the file such as file size (in Content-Length) and modification time (Last-Modified). These should not be sent in this case.
• The example module, mod_example, uses memory but does not free it.

Patches to Apache 1.2b10 bugs may be available in the 1.2b10 patches directory on the Apache site. At time of writing there are no patches and this directory does not exist.

For details of all previously reported bugs, see the Apache bug database.

Apache is currently in a 'beta release' cycle. This is where it is made available prior to full release for testing by anyone interested. Normally during the beta cycle no new major features will be added. The full release of Apache 1.2 is now expected in May.

As we reported last week, the 1.2 beta versions of Apache caused some CGI scripts to break in certain configurations. Most scripts are not setup like this, so were not affected. However the change made Apache slightly incompatible with older Apaches, NCSA and CERN. This has now been fixed.

The new FILEPATH_INFO environment variable, introduced in 1.2 beta, has been removed (any code written to use this variable should use PATH_INFO instead if it does not exist, so this should not affect any 1.2 beta specific scripts).

If the script does need to see the path info (and other information) for the request URI, it can now do so by using the new environment variable REQUEST_URI.

Yahoo has now served over a billion pages -- and most come from Apache servers, according to C|Net's Rumor Mill: Yahoo: 1 billion served, but not by Netscape. Even the "Netscape Guide" (netscape.yahoo.com) uses Apache!