In this issue

After fixes for the three problematic mod_include bugs covered previously were checked in, another emerged and prompted the ever-prolific André Malo to rewrite most of the code in the module. The edge cases in the filtering logic have been eliminated and the cleaner code will hopefully prove to easier to maintain.

Releases are pending from both the stable 2.0 tree and the unstable 2.1 tree; the 2.0.48 release will include useful improvements to mod_deflate along with the usual horde of bug fixes. The first release from the 2.1 tree will pave the way towards a stable "2.2" release; this prompted discussion of some design issues with the filter interface which are yet to be settled.

The "zombie CGI process" bug introduced in the 1.3.28 release (BZ#21737) was fixed once, then fixed again, after it was discovered the original check-in did not solve the problem on some platforms; the final patch can be retrieved from the CVS repository.

We've had a few emails from people who have wondered why we've missed out so many issues of Apache Week this year. We decided some time ago that rather than fill up your inboxes with lower quality padding, we'd sometimes miss out issues if there is nothing much exciting to report about. We've also all been out on holidays and we're a little light on staff as long-time Apache Week author, Min Min Tsan, has left Red Hat to pursue other opportunities. Many thanks Min Min for your two years of Featured Articles and reviews.

The first issue of the official Apache Newsletter was launched a couple of weeks ago. The monthly newsletter aims to cover all of the Apache Software Foundation projects and is packed with development news as well as details of all the new releases.

Preparations are now well underway for ApacheCon 2003, with the organisers taking a gamble and betting that people will want to go back to same venue in Las Vegas as ApacheCon 2002.

The conference schedule isn't yet online but a number of bloggers have already worked out a way to subvert the Apache IRC channel bot to work out that their sessions were accepted. These include "Developing Web Applications with CGI::Application", "Scheduled Advanced Apache Administration with Perl", "PHP Attacks and Defense", and "Apache Security Secrets Revealed"

Apache Week will be there as always to report on the festivities, but it is nothing like being there in person and being able to talk to the members that actually write the software. We'd suggest you mark off November 16th to the 19th in your calendars in anticipation of registration opening.

In this month's web server survey from Netcraft, Apache leaps up to take over 67% market share, the first time it has been over the two-thirds mark.

Meanwhile Information Week report that "Microsoft Takes Linux For A Test Drive", and installs Apache in their Enterprise Engineering Centre. No doubt in order to learn how to compete with the market leader.

Also last month, the Apache Software Foundation announced that they would start incubation of a new project with the aims to develop an open source, Apache-licensed, implementation of the J2EE specification. More details are available from the article at internetnews.com or from the ASF project page.

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

TechRepublic look at what it takes to "Protect your Apache server from DoS attacks". The article gives a good introduction to what the different types of Denial of Service attack are and how they impact on users running Apache servers, and ends with a look at the third party mod_dosevasive module.

In "mod_rewrite: No More Endless Loops!", Andrea Rossignoli takes a look at the recent addition to the RewriteOptions directive, MaxRedirects. This tutorial shows how to configure and use the directive and how it can protect against mistakes when creating mod_rewrite rules.

Sun have produced a case study, "Porting Apache Web Server from Solaris OS, SPARC Platform Edition to x86 Platform Edition" which gives a step by step guide to download, compile, install, and run, Apache 2 on Solaris.