Death of Rats writes "Today I found this tool. Its called The Apache Toolbox and is a REAL timesaver. No more struggling to get Apache working the way you want it with the features you want it. This program will install and configure not only Apache, but SSL, PHP, MySQL, ZendOptimizer, mod_auth_nds, mod_dynvhost, WebDAV, mod_fastcgi, mod_gzip, mod_layout, mod_throttle, mod_accessref, mod_auth_sys, mod_bandwidth, mod_auth_ldap, mod_roaming, mod_perl, OpenLDAP, and the latest gd libraries with PNG support. It is menu-driven, it also checks for any RPMs that would cause conflicts AND downloads any required software automatically using wget. It doesn't get any better than this :)"

This is a great project. DSO modules have made it a lot easier to install add ons to your Apache project, but many modules are still pretty painful to install (mod_ssl, mod_perl).
What would really be nice is for someone to do a CPAN style module system for Apache. Personally I think it would be nice if you just got the core system from the Apache group and then just fetched what modules you wanted/needed from that point. Something like this could even get more people contributing to the Apache project and remove some of the stigma they get for being an "old boys club".

[JEB] writes "Yet another apache alpha has been released: the changelog even shows that mod_proxy is almost working. Get it here."

jmallett asks: "I tried using the latest Apache (2.0a7) but I had worse problems with unfiltered IO than I had in 2.0a6. I have a section at the bottom of my page that contains the uptime (generated by an SSI), which showed up only half the time in 2.0a6, and almost NEVER in 2.0a7 (where I had to do it in CGI because SSI seems totally borked). Why is unfiltered IO such an advantage other than it frees up Apache? Unless the pipe is kept open, and the output size determined ahead of time, it doesn't seem like this works for some things. Is there any way to enable filtered IO and SSI in Apache 2.0a7?"

The fine folks at Netcraft have released this month's survey results. Notable figures - our uptime has seen "pronounced improvement", according to the results (true), Microsoft saw their biggest single month increase - but the reasons behind that and other host de/increases are more detailed.

Ralf S. Engelschall writes: "The slide set of my presentation, 'Security Solutions with SSL,' which I gave at ApacheCon 2000/EU in London last Monday is available online under http://www.modssl.org/docs/apachecon2000/. Check it out if you have not attended ApacheCon but if you are nevertheless interested in Apache and SSL. A PNG-capable browser is required to view."

nomis writes: "Our favourite Webserver got one more award: The German issue of the Big Brother award, which blames privacy problems and tries to enforce a public discussion on this topic. Reason is the (from the technical point of view) unnecessary logging of various information (IP-Number etc.). The reasons for the award are described in German here. Basically the ability to log various information provokes user tracking and abuse of the collected data. I think they have a point. At least the default Configuration should log sparsely..." Interesting point.

According to the Java Apache Project page, Avalon 3.0 alpha has been released. Avalon is a common framework for server applications written Java. If you are interested in more information you might want take a look here.

If you have been interested in Apache on Apple's new OS X operating system, this article on Mac Central offers a short description on what is up with it. Even before this article I was (and still am) interested in seeing how hard it is going to be to keep your copy of Apache current. And just how many modifications were required to make it work with OS X?

If you're into using PHP for your Web design you might want to take a look at this article on Developer Shed about PHP and OOP features in version 4.0. If you have been looking for a nice introduction to PHP OOP, this is story for you.

jhughes asks: " I work for a public university and have just recently 'acquired' the project of switching a community Web page (for the city and surrounding counties/cities) to a new machine running Apache. I'm relatively new to Apache but thus far this has not been a problem. The real problem comes from the request of a search engine for the Web sites information. This site will contain a large amount of public information, such as rental property, council meeting minutes, and so on. They are requesting that the search engine be able to scan the entire site for all the data, or specific subtopics (such as 'City Government', 'City Council', or 'City Council Meeting Minutes', with searches limited to each of those areas if need be). To me this sounds similar to what Yahoo has done in some cases (You can search Yahoo, or Yahoo US States, or Yahoo US States California, or specific cities, etc). I honestly have no clue what search engine to use for this. Are there commercial search engines that one could purchase and adapt, or is there a free/open source one out there that would work just as well? There will eventually be a huge amount of information (as all government sites seem to accumulate) online, so it'd need to be able to handle large indexes. Any help, advice, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

The latest version of the Apache 1.3.x Web server was released today with the announcement of the availability of Apache 1.3.14. Included in this release are security fixes for mod_rewrite and mod_vhost_alias, so it's strongly recommended to upgrade! Also included is support for "configuration directories" which behave similarly to init's rc.d directories.

The latest release was supposed to be 1.3.13, but a last minute build problem scrapped that version... Shame too, since the idea of the ASF was to release the 13th of 1.3 on the 13th.

It seems that the latest version of the most popular module for Apache, PHP, has been released as PHP 4.0.3. There are some interesting changes, including some security fixes and extensions in shared memory handling. Of special note are the changes in htmlspecialchars/htmlentities and the ENT_COMPAT mode which allows you to reenable the pre-4.0.2 quote translation matrix. Get yours now!

Skapare asks: "A year ago, this question about using Apache and SSL in a commercial environment was asked in the Apache section of Slashdot. The RSA patent was still in force back then, and the focus was on commercial products like Raven. Since then, the RSA patent has been released and then expired. That same month a year ago, Ask Slashdot also featured a question about encumbrance of SSL/PGP. But with the RSA patent gone, and Diffie-Hellman before it, this surely opens up Apache with SSL free for commercial use. Now I'm exploring options for free SSL for Apache, and note at least two choices, Apache-SSL, and mod_ssl. What I'd like to ask is what are the fundamental and principle differences between these free versions that I should consider in deciding which I should use in a commercial environment."

Infoworld has released their list of the top E-Business Innovators and, lookie-lookie, the Apache Group was selected because of the Apache Server Project. What's also nice is that Infoworld "got it right" in attributing the work to the entire group, and getting the feel of how the group operates. No idea where they got the idea that the future Apache will "no longer be a C language-based Web server"...

On ApacheToday, Ryan Bloom has written an article on Apache 2.0's filtered I/O system. If you are interested in what the Apache group finally decided on for an API level filtering system you might want to take a look at it.

Eric Sun writes "For you die-hard Apache users out there, the seventh alpha version of Apache 2.0 has been released. A list of the new features can be found here. As always, you can download it from the distribution site."

Greg Merideth asks: "In the midst of my proposal to universally sweep all of our company web servers together I was handed an advertisement from DELL by our CIO with a big circle around two machines that DELL sells with an interesting note. They are identical machines, literally identical machines but the claim is that the Linux 6.2 Apache based machine only supports 20k-100k hits per day while the Windows 2000 IIS based machine (remember, same config) supports 500k-1M hits per day. Now if DELL is claiming that NT, with the same config will out-perform Apache in serving web traffic, how am I supposed to convince my company that Apache and open source is a great way to go? They don't care about open source or Linux, just the performance that they will get from the machines. Where can I get -credible- data to prove that Apache can outperform IIS?"

Developer Shed has an article up on how to build your dream Apache server. Has a nice overview on how to install Apache, talks about using DSOs, the different directives for configure and what the different default modules do. If you have found yourself a bit confused about how to build Apache, you might want to take a look at it.

Fooster asks: "I edit several (mostly) unrelated Web sites hosted on a Linux virtual hosting machine running Apache. Often in an idle moment between edits, I'll watch my logs with a 'ail -f access &'. Today, I started to get bursts of requests for robots.txt from several different major service provider IP blocks that were almost simultaneous. Some time later, I'd get another burst, with some of the requests coming from different IPs. All in all, I had over 100 times more requests for robots.txt today than ever before in one day. Unlike most search engine robots.txt requests, there was no info in the referrer field and a reverse DNS lookup did not lead me back to a search engine info provider. I found the requests to be coming from blocks owned by ISPs like Qwest, AT&T, BBN and others. A cursory examination of the literature revealed no reports of exploits based on robots.txt, so I decided to 'Ask Slashdot.' Have any other Webmasters noticed this? Am I just being paranoid? Take a look at the logs yourself, and let me know please."

Both Brendan Quinn and msim were curious about the ability to send gzip-encoded Web pages. Brendan asks: "It's possible to make Apache detect the "Accept-encoding: gzip" field sent by NS 4.7+, IE 4+ and Lynx, and send a gzip-encoded page, thus saving lots of bandwidth all over the place. So why don't people do it? Here is a module written by the Mozilla guys a couple of years ago that -almost- does what I want, and I could change it pretty easily... but I thought someone else would have done it by now? eXcite do it, does anyone know of any other large-scale sites that use gzip encoding?"