CERN httpd 3.0 PreRelease Notes

3.0 Prerelease 3

• No longer strips hyphens from content-types and content-encodings that are given in the configuration file (broken in pre1).
• GMT-to-localtime transformation works now on all platforms in caching (was broken on others than Sun).
• Binary-FTP works again (broken pre2).
• Unescaping bug fixed in news module (caused many articles to fail to be retrieved).
• News module now gives appropriate error reponses for unavailable articles and non-existent news groups.
• FTP and HTTP modules now give better error responses.
• Fixed the cache access log to show the correct content-lengths.

3.0 Prerelease 2

• Respects UserId and GroupId directives again.
• FTP module no longer prints messages to stderr in non-verbose mode.
• ~username form understood with ServerRoot, Search, PutScript, PostScript, DeleteScript, AccessLog, ErrorLog, CacheAccessLog directives.
• Opens cache access log only if caching is turned on.
• Binary distribution now contains a template configuration file that has all the configuration directives understood by httpd (thanks to Sean Gonzalez for it!).

3.0 Prerelease 1

• If-Modified-Since GET request now works correctly with proxy (client can do conditional GET/proxy can do conditional GET plus all the combinations of these).
• Pragma: no-cache supported; by sending this header to the proxy the client will force it to refresh its cache from remote server. Pragma headers are also forwarded to the remote server.
• Server now resets its state correctly when it receives the HUP signal (directory listing icons used to stop working).
• -restart option - httpd will find out the actual server process number and send s HUP signal to it to make it reload its configuration files; note that httpd must still have the same configuration file command line parameters (-r options) as the actual server (so it finds out the ServerRoot and PidFile).
• Now makes appropriate entry to error log when restarting.
• Made common logfile format default, the old format can still be used with the LogFormat directive:

  	LogFormat old
  

• Multiple wild-card (asterisk) matching in configuration file works; it is a bit different from typical regular expression matching in that the wildcard matches the shortest possible amount of characters instead of the longest matching string; this is the best choise in most of the cases. Consider:

  	Pass  http://*/*  /mirror/*/http/*
  

  Clearly the first asterisk should rather match only the hostname, and not the entire path except the filename.
• Rules can now have asterisks and whitespace in them: precede them with a backslah; as a result also the backslash itself has to be escaped with another backslash.
• The tilde character after a slash has to be explicitly matched:

  	Map	/*	/foo/bar/*
  

  does not match user-supported directories, but:

  	Map	/~*	/Webs/users/*
  

  does match them.
• Fixed the problem that user-supported directories could not be mapped or Protect'ed.
• Hostname matching made case-insensitive in access control/caching
• Added suffixes .htm and .htmls to the default set of known suffixes.
• Fixed some of the mysterious caching problems (all that were reported to me and that I could reproduce).
• Made it possible to specify the various byte/kilo/mega sizes in cache configuration with letters after the number (so it's no longer necessary to remember if the default is kilobytes or megabytes):

  	CacheSize	150 M
  	CacheLimit_1	100 K
  	CacheLimit_2	2 M
  

  The numbers still have to be cardinals.
• Content-Length given for all documents, including (non-nph-)script responses, generated directory listings, error responses, all the documents retrieved over another protocol by the proxy (FTP, Gopher, ...), including HTTP responses from servers that didn't give it originally.
• MaxContentLengthBuffer directive to specify the maximum bytecount for the proxy to buffer in order to find out the content-length for the client - content-length is always calculated for the logs, but the user migth interrupt the connection if nothing seems to be happening, even though it is the proxy that is just buffering the entire file in order to find out the content-length before actually sending it to the client.
• Caching module now checks that it receives the correct content-length; if not it discards the cached document. This rules out the possibility to cache a truncated document from a timed out connection in 99.99% of the cases (0.01% comes from the fact that Plexus sends a timeout error message concatenated to the document and if so should happen that this produces exactly the correct content-length then there is nothing that can be done about it; in practice this never happens).
• Made HEAD work always, even on proxy with other protocols (FTP, Gopher...).
• PASV (Passive mode) in FTP now supported. It is no longer necessary to allow incoming connections above 1024 on the firewall host just to make FTP work. If PASV fails httpd will retry PORT.
• Welcome messages from FTP servers get shown on top of the directory listings.
• Fixed bug with old FTP files fixed getting wrong date in the listing.
• Gopher listings now have icons.
• Proxy now reports unknown host errors appropriately.
• Fixed encoding-decoding problems with directory listings.
• Added ScriptTimeOut - scripts that do not finish in this amount of time will be killed by httpd. Default value is 5 minutes.
• A /~username URL with an invalid username no longer causes an infinite redirection loop.
• The two files missing in FTP listings are no longer missing (they weren't in 2.18beta, either).
• Fixed a possible error condition that might cause the server to stop responding, or even die.
• Server now resets its UserId and GroupId even when in gc-only mode (this solves problems with .cache_info files sometimes being unwritable to actual caching processes).
• CacheAccessLog is now opened during startup while running as root to avoid opening problems. There is no longer logging to individual files according to remote hosts - all cache accesses are logged to this single file.
• CacheOnly directive for specifying a set of URLs that should be cached (for cases when there are only a few sites that should be cached).
• Added DELETE-Script directive for specifying the CGI script to handle DELETE method.
• NoProxy directive to allow the proxy to do direct access to some servers instead of connecting to another proxy server (contains a list of domain names). This works exactly like the no_proxy environment variable on clients. (Thanks to Rainer Klute for the patch!) This is only necessary when running multiple proxy servers that connect to each other.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused time directives to be parsed incorrectly (e.g. CacheDefaultExpiry).
• Multilanguage addition to allow server to understand e.g. that British English is also English, and that the US citizens do understand it (thanks to Toshihiro Takada for the patch!).
• Removed:
  • GcReqInterval and GcTimeInterval - not very good criteria to start doing garbage collection (GcDailyGc is better, giving the actual time to lauch gc)
  • cache access logging to individual logfiles according to remote host (wasted resources - a separate program is better for collecting this information from a single log file).
  • -a and -R options (never used).
  • BodyTimeOut replaced by ScriptTimeOut
  • includes from Makefiles (not supported by all the makes).
  • #elif preprocessor directive removed (wasn't supported by all the HP preprocessors)