In this issue

Apache Site: www.apache.org
Release: 1.3.4 (Released 11^th January 1999) (local download sites)
Beta: None

Apache 1.3.4 is the current stable release. Users of Apache 1.3.3 and earlier should look at upgrading to this version. Read the Guide to 1.3.4 for information about changes between 1.3.3 and 1.3.4 and between 1.2 and 1.3.4.

These bugs have been found in 1.3.4 and will be fixed in the next release.

• In Apache 1.3.4, lines in the error log were being preceeded by "httpd: ". This will be removed in the next version to avoid breaking any automatic error log analysis programs.
• If a CGI returns a Set-Cookie header it was sometimes being duplicated in the response to the client. PR#3872.
• If the mod_info module was compiled as a DSO and the relevant lines uncommented in iin the distributed httpd.conf file, Apache would not start because the mod_info directive appeared before the line which loaded mod_info into the server. PR#3936.
• Fix potential buffer overrun problem. PR#3917.
• Added support for the standard file layout on Mac OS X (Rhapsody).

Patches for bugs in Apache 1.3.4 will be made available in the apply_to_1.3.4 subdirectory of the patches directory on the Apache site. Some new features and other unofficial patches are available in the 1.3 patches directory. For details of all previously reported bugs, see the Apache bug database and known bugs pages. Many common configuration questions are answered in the Apache FAQ.

Rewrite maps have been made much faster for maps containing large number of entries. For both DBM and text maps, the result of lookups are cached in memory, including the case when the lookup failed. In addition, text maps have been made faster through changes to the way that they are parsed, and this also fixes a problem which meant that a comma (",") could not be used in the key. See also PR#3160.

The current version of Apache traps the SIGPIPE signal to see if the connection to the client (browser) has been lost. However this means that Apache modules cannot use SIGPIPE if they have outgoing connections to, say, a database or other remote system. The core of Apache has been updated now so that it does not use or trap SIGPIPE at all. Instead, all functions which write to or read from the client check their error status and if the connection is lost they set the "aborted" field in the connection data structure.

This will allow modules to trap SIGPIPE so that they can monitor their own connection. Modules can also check for a lost connection more easily, by looking at the aborted field.

Apache Rules The Web according to PC Magazine (23^rd March 1999). This article provides a brief look at how IIS and Apache compare, and why Apache is so widely used.