---------------------------- WEB SERVER SOFTWARE UPGRADED ---------------------------- The following should be of interest to anyone who has Web pages on BCPL's Web server. Early Saturday morning (December 27) we switched over from our old Web server software, NCSA HTTPd 1.4.1, to Apache 1.3b3. Apache began life several years ago as a modified version of the NCSA server, but has since then become an entirely different product. Today it is considered to be the fastest, most reliable, and most feature-rich non-commercial Web server software available, and is the most widely-used Web server software on the Internet. As indicated by the "b3" in its version number, Apache 1.3b3 is a beta version. There is always some risk in using beta software, but this version provides several features we want to try out. Apache 1.3b3 is running reliably all over the Internet so the risk is probably minimal. If it proves to be otherwise here at BCPL, we can "backgrade" (is that a word?) to the most recent non-beta version, Apache 1.2.4. Most of you probably won't notice anything different about how your Web pages are served up, but there are a few minor changes you may want to know about: Logs ---- Those of you who extract statistics for your Web sites from the Web server's log files will find the access_log and error_log files in their same old place (/carl/httpd/logs). Those logs will continue to be rotated every Saturday night at Midnight. However you will notice that agent_log and referer_log are no longer there. Those log files are seldom used but take up a lot of valuable disk space. They are optional under Apache, so we have done away with them to save space. .htaccess Files --------------- If you have any .htaccess files in your Web space, make sure their permissions are set to make them readable by "user" (you), "group", and "other". If you use the command "ls -la" in a directory containing an .htaccess file, the line for that file should begin with "-rw-r--r--". If it doesn't, use the command "chmod 644 .htaccess" to fix the permissions. This is necessary because the Web server must be able to read the contents of every .htaccess file in the path to your Web documents. When the old NCSA server couldn't read an .htaccess file, it simply ignored it. If the new Apache server can't read an .htaccess file, it writes a message to the error_log and sends an "Access Denied" message to the browser trying to access your pages. If your Web pages suddenly ceased to be accessible as of early Saturday morning, this may be the reason. Most of you may no longer need .htaccess files anyway. The old NCSA server didn't know how to deal with files ending with ".htm", such as are created by PC-based HTML editors. It understood only the standard ".html" extension. To get around this limitation many of you used .htaccess files containing the directive "AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm". This ceased to be necessary about a year ago when we added that same directive to the old NCSA server's configuration. The ability to serve up ".htm" files is built into Apache. If you have that directive in an .htaccess file, you should remove it. If that is the only directive in your .htaccess file, you might as well delete the file. Error Messages: -------------- If you dig through the error_log you may find entries containing the statement "(0)Error 0: mmap_handler: mmap failed:". Such error messages are mistakes. They are caused by a logging bug in Apache, and can be ignored. That's about it for now. If I come across any other differences between the old server and the new that might affect your Web pages, I'll post them here in System News. ------------------------------------------------------------------- All System News is archived at http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/sysnews.html (or enter "sysnews" at the UNIX shell prompt) If you have questions about this message or about anything else related to your BCPL Internet Account, please contact the BCPL Help Desk. Phone: 410-887-3297 FAX: 410-887-2091 E-Mail: help@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us Visit our Help pages at: http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/help.html (or enter "help" at the UNIX shell prompt)