From http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-history/200205.mbox/%3CPine.LNX.4.33.0205311249150.28610-100000@rhiannon.rcbowen.com%3E From Rich Bowen Subject Re: Introduction, looking for NCSA httpd history (fwd) Date Fri, 31 May 2002 16:49:29 GMT For the archives ... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 21:26:37 -0700 From: Rob McCool To: Rich Bowen Cc: Randy Terbush , Thomas Eibner Subject: Re: Introduction, looking for NCSA httpd history > Thanks for your quick response. We're still a little unprepared, as we > are still reading through the email archives (8 years of email takes a > while to get through!) but we do have a few questions if you are willing > to humor us. > > By the way, "we" is myself and Thomas Eibner. > > We'd like to know ... > > How did you first get involved in the NCSA HTTPd project, and who else > worked on that with you? It was largely me, Eric Bina did some work on group annotations, and I took some ideas/code/etc. from a number of people across the Web. If I tried to name them I'd probably forget a lot of people. I first got involved because Marc wanted to have a small, simple server that people could use with Mosaic. He felt the CERN server was too large and complex, and that something small and easy to understand would facilitate more widespread adoption. > What event(s) resulted in that project's demise, which was the catalyst > for Apache? What event(s) resulted in the project's revival, and then > its later re-demise? I left and went to Netscape. It was a conflict of interest to continue working on NCSA httpd, and so it languished after I released 1.3. There was a maintainer, but there wasn't much forward progress and I was never sure why. The guy who was doing the maintenance was Carlos Varela, maybe he can tell you more about what happened. The catalyst for Apache was this lack of effort in maintaining NCSA httpd; people had stuff they needed done and it wasn't getting done. NCSA later decided that they would revive the project, and so two new releases were created (1.4, 1.5). I wasn't around when the revival became a redemise, so I don't know what happened. The person to ask would be Brandon Long; he was the primary push behind the revival. There's a list of people who were largely involved in the revival here: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/acknowledgement.html > We're trying to track down when the name "Apache" first came into use, > and what the real reasons were for that. The earliest email archives we > have talk about a decision, but post-date the actual discussion itself. > Any memories you may have of that would be helpful. I wasn't involved in the discussion, so I'm not sure I can help you. The best I was able to come up with is this: http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/417/1995/2/0/2312442/ > Do you have a release history of NCSA HTTPd, what changes were in the > various versions? Any email archives from the development? Best place to look for early release history is here: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/old/httpd-0.5/README and in the README files in various packages here: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/ Email archives from the development would probably best be found in old archives of www-talk, search for my name if you want to try and find threads relevant to httpd. > Do you have the source for any/all of the released versions of NCSA > HTTPd? Of most interest would be the version against which the original > Apache patches were to be applied. But any versions would be > appreciated. Look in the "old" subdirectory of the second ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu... link there. It has a bunch of stuff. I believe Apache was based on version 1.3, that was the last one I worked with. NCSA's 1.4 was developed in parallel with the Apache code; there's discussion on the new-httpd list about the duplication of effort. > Thomas may have some other questions, but those are the ones that are of > most interest to me right now. > > Thanks again for your quick response and your willingness to help in > this project. Sure. Hope it helps. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: history-unsubscribe@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: history-help@apache.org And from http://web.archive.org/web/20010707144411/http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/417/1995/2/0/2312442/ FROM: Robert S. Thau DATE: 02/28/1995 10:20:23 SUBJECT: RE: Informing NCSA, archive of the list Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 17:44:25 -0800 (PST) From: Brian Behlendorf <> I`ve set up a very simple mailbox archive, at http://hyperreal.com/httpd/archive - I`ll spend some time later tonight to convert it to hypermail if I have time. Would someone be willing to summarize our current position and mail it to the list for the benefit of new subscribers and the archive? I nominate rst for this. OK, Brian, you asked for it. Here`s my impression of the group consensus on areas where I think there is a consensus, along with a few important issues where I don`t think a consensus has been reached. >From the top: NCSA httpd 1.3 was originally released the better part of a year ago. Since this release (which came more or less with the departure of Rob McCool to what is now Netscape), there hasn`t been a new release of Unix server software from NCSA. However, 1.3 is not a perfect product, and in the absence of further visible development from NCSA, a lot of people have found themselves fixing or extending 1.3 to meet their needs --- in the process fixing the same bugs and deficiencies over and over, at different sites. For instance, there are now three initgroups() patches floating around. This group consists of people who`ve all had to patch 1.3 at one time or another, either to extend server functionality, fix bugs, or improve performance. Our goal is to produce a revised version of NCSA 1.3 which has all the popular fixes in it directly, in order to have a supported server which actually meets our needs. (In the meantime, NCSA has actually announced 1.4, which is now in early beta. What we do about this is our biggest unresolved issue). Our current plan is to set up an RCS source tree someplace (probably hyperreal.com), with the distributed NCSA server (which one?) as a base. We`re going to apply patches to this, test the result, and when it works, distribute it. --- probably under the name "Apache". The current consensus seems to be that we should have a review process for which patches get applied, but the details remain to be hashed out. (For instance, do we want an expedited process for simple bug-fixes, of which an awful lot seem to be drifting by these days?) [NB, that`s not a consensus that your humble reporter particularly *likes*, but it does seem to be the consensus]. As to the product, we seem to have decided to call it Apache. (If you`re wondering about the name, say "Apache server" ten time fast. Europeans may want to fake their best American accent while trying this). We may have just decided that the working sources will not have #ifdefs around sections which are changed from the NCSA base code, since RCS can generate the #ifdefs automatically whenever required, and since some of the code would get awfully cluttered if every bug fix had #ifdefs around it (particularly once we reach the inevitable point of fixing bugs in our own code). However, that was a very recent discussion, and someone with serious objections may not have spoken up. Finally, I might as well start listing the various patches which I`ve seen discussed here over the past few days, with a view towards starting some kind of discussion about which we are actually going go with in the immediate future. Going just from memory, with apologies to anyone with something critical which I left out, we have the following: Bug fixes: (most available in multiple versions) *) The stack-scribbling security hole. Note that there are two patches for this -- the CIAC/CERT patch, and the official NCSA patch. The CERT patch makes the server processes substantially larger; the NCSA patch doesn`t, but a lot of us don`t trust it. *) Server always pauses 3 seconds for scripts which send a redirect, then gratuitously kills the process (which is probably dead anyway at that point). *) server-side include doesn`t always take. *) log files should be written with O_APPEND. *) when access control is "Limit"ed with "Order allow,deny", the server allows by default, making any Allow directives which may be present redundant. *) httpd can`t handle numeric User specs in httpd.conf unless that uid appears in the passwd file. If multiple usernames have the same uid, it sometimes sets group permissions with the wrong one. (Integrated with drtr`s version of the initgroups() fix). Performance enhancements: (most available in multiple versions) *) Don`t do initgroups() once per connection. (But do redo it after rereading the config files). *) Don`t do kernel read()s of one character, when reading MIME headers from clients, or script CGI headers. *) Don`t do open_locale() and tzset() once per connection. (These routines are called from C library time conversion code). *) Shared-memory name server cache. [I have this, though it`s less portable than it could be]. Functional enhancements: (Note that many of these are still in the process of being packaged up for submittal): *) DBM-based user databases for HTTP authentication. [Brian] *) New CGI variables (DOCUMENT_ROOT, SCRIPT_TRANSLATED_NAME). [Brian?] *) *.doit scripts (allows *any* URL to invoke a script, whether it ends in a magic *.cgi suffix or not). [rst] *) Logging User-agent and Referer, at least on errors. [Roy Fielding?] *) Load throttling --- reject incoming connections if load is too high. [Robert Evans] If anyone has something *right* *now* that they`d like to see in an early Apache release, which I haven`t listed, this would be a good time to step forward. rst From owner-new-httpd Tue Feb 28 08:41:46 1995