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Upgrading to Apache 2 (Linux.com)

Linux.com has some advice for those who haven't yet gotten around to upgrading to apache2. "Apache 2 offers a number of new features and improvements over the Apache 1.3 series, but the upgrade can seem daunting to those who haven't had much (or any) experience with Apache 2. I recently had to go through an upgrade from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.0 on Debian Sarge, and it's not as difficult as you might think."

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Upgrading to Apache 2 (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 7, 2005 21:38 UTC (Wed) by lacostej (guest, #2760) [Link]

Here are my notes for the same operation (written about a year ago). They can be complimentary to this article as they cover things like logrotate, awstats, gallery etc...

http://coffeebreaks.dyndns.org/~jerome/wordpress/?p=126

Someone might find them interesting.

Only if you don't need large file support.

Posted Sep 8, 2005 0:27 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (3 responses)

Maybe we will switch when 2.1 gets stable, as 2.0 lacks the large file support (that 1.3 has. I wonder why they took it out of 2.0)...

Of course, not everyone needs their webserver to be capable of handling files >2GB (4GB?), so this is not a showstopper for most.

Only if you don't need large file support.

Posted Sep 8, 2005 8:09 UTC (Thu) by Dom2 (guest, #458) [Link]

Large File Support is broken in both 1.3 and 2.0. 2.0 handles it slightly better, but both need special compilation options. The most annoying thing that I found with 1.3 was that it returned negative Content-Length headers...

-Dom

Only if you don't need large file support.

Posted Sep 8, 2005 9:38 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Okaay. I have Apache 2.0 web-server with 3-4GiB files. Works great. What's your problem ?

You do not need any special support in Apache! GlibC has everything you need - just recompile with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64

Only if you don't need large file support.

Posted Sep 8, 2005 14:57 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=241223
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=28898

If it were that simple :( That said, it'd be nice if Debian backported the 2.1 fixes and enabled 64-bit file support fixed in 2.0. I don't know what the other distros are doing.

I stand corrected about support in 1.3, though. Strange as it is, nobody ever complained and all 4.7GB DVD images we use for development worked just fine being served by 1.3.x. Maybe the clients we used are bug-to-bug compatible, or something.

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 3:17 UTC (Thu) by Zarathustra (guest, #26443) [Link] (7 responses)

Apache2 is very useful, as a textbook example of second-system effect.

Apache2 has worse design and worse license than Apache1.

The quality of the implementation is about equally bad, except that Apache1 has been around for ages so a good amount of bugs have been found and fixed.

Also the OpenBSD folks are cleaning up Apache1, so it might even get a sane implementation some day.

All in all, there are no reasons to 'upgrade', and many reasons to stick with Apache1, or even switch to one of it's alternatives.

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 3:45 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Apache2 has worse design and worse license than Apache1.

Absolutely. And all the key mappings are wrong in it too :-)

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 4:13 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (4 responses)

Hyperlink to a better designed, feature-complete http server, please? TIA

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 6:50 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 7:07 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Touche. :)

Other (non-trivial) webservers

Posted Sep 8, 2005 9:10 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

"Feature-complete" is the tough part of course. But Caudium should fit the bill. It is written in Pike which is a more C-like Python, but performance is still comparable to Apache. It has been used for some very large installations but has been declining in popularity for some reason. Both design and security is really good.

I've also had luck with lighttpd which is written in C, very fast, and uses a module system much like Apache's. Not as many features as the others perhaps but very straightforward design and easy to configure. Has had a security problem once which is always is a bad sign, but has been ok since then.

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 9, 2005 14:06 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Whatever Plan9 uses, I would guess.

Why 'upgrade'?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 8:20 UTC (Thu) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

I can't speak for the quality of the codebase, but Apache2 does support a good number of configurations that Apache1 simply can't support. The new filter system alone, for example, allows very powerful configuration of processing pipelines.

The DAV module has also been given a large feature upgrade.

I know the MPM system has helped a lot of hackers get Apache processing requests on their systems exactly the way they want.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/new_features_2_0.html

One reason you might put this off

Posted Sep 8, 2005 21:44 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

is if you use mod_perl based applications behind your server.

Mod_perl 2.0 is finally out, but in the very late 1.99rc release train, they decided (for good, though painful) reasons to switch it from the apache namespace to the apache2 namespace... which meant that mod_perl 1 apps would no longer run against it without modification, as they (mostly) would before.


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