Apache HTTP Server 1.3.28 Released
The Apache Software Foundation and The Apache Server Project are
pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.28 of the Apache HTTP
Server ("Apache"). This Announcement notes the significant changes
in 1.3.28 as compared to 1.3.27. The Announcement is also available
in German from http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/Announcement.txt.de.This version of Apache is principally a bug and security fix release.
A partial summary of the bug fixes is given at the end of this document.
A full listing of changes can be found in the CHANGES file. Of
particular note is that 1.3.28 addresses and fixes 3 potential
security issues:
o CAN-2003-0460 (cve.mitre.org): Fix the rotatelogs support program on
Win32 and OS/2 to ignore special control characters received over the
pipe. Previously such characters could cause it to quit logging and
exit. We would like to thank the Hitachi Incident Response team for
their responsible disclosure of this issue.
o VU#379828 : The server could crash when going into an infinite loop
due to too many subsequent internal redirects and nested subrequests.
o Eliminated leaks of several file descriptors to child processes, such
as CGI scripts.
We consider Apache 1.3.28 to be the best version of Apache 1.3 available
and we strongly recommend that users of older versions, especially of
the 1.1.x and 1.2.x family, upgrade as soon as possible. No further
releases will be made in the 1.2.x family.
Apache 1.3.28 is available for download from
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi - or - http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/
Please see the CHANGES_1.3 file in the same directory for a full list of changes.
Binary distributions are available from
http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/
The source and binary distributions are also available via any of the mirrors listed at
http://www.apache.org/mirrors/
As of Apache 1.3.12 binary distributions contain all standard Apache
modules as shared objects (if supported by the platform) and include
full source code. Installation is easily done by executing the
included install script. See the README.bindist and INSTALL.bindist
files for a complete explanation. Please note that the binary
distributions are only provided for your convenience and current
distributions for specific platforms are not always available. Win32
binary distributions are based on the Microsoft Installer (.MSI)
technology. While development continues to make this installation method
more robust, questions should be directed to the
news:comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows newsgroup.
For an overview of new features introduced after 1.2 please see
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/new_features_1_3.html
In general, Apache 1.3 offers several substantial improvements over version 1.2, including better performance, reliability and a wider range of supported platforms, including Windows NT and 2000 (which fall under the "Win32" label), OS2, Netware, and TPE threaded platforms.
Apache is the most popular web server in the known universe; over half
of the servers on the Internet are running Apache or one of its
variants.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR APACHE USERS: Apache 1.3 was designed for Unix OS
variants. While the ports to non-Unix platforms (such as Win32, Netware
or OS2) are of an acceptable quality, Apache 1.3 is not optimized for
these platforms. Security, stability, or performance issues on these
non-Unix ports do not generally apply to the Unix version, due to
software's Unix origin.
Apache 2.0 has been structured for multiple operating systems from its
inception, by introducing the Apache Portability Library and MPM modules.
Users on non-Unix platforms are strongly encouraged to move up to
Apache 2.0 for better performance, stability and security on their
platforms.
Apache 1.3.28 Major changes
Security vulnerabilities
* CAN-2003-0460 (cve.mitre.org): Fix the rotatelogs support program on
Win32 and OS/2 to ignore special control characters received over the
pipe. Previously such characters could cause it to quit logging and
exit. We would like to thank the Hitachi Incident Response team for
their responsible disclosure of this issue.
* VU#379828 : The server could crash when going into an infinite loop
due to too many subsequent internal redirects and nested subrequests.
* Eliminated leaks of several file descriptors to child processes, such
as CGI scripts.
New features
The main new features in 1.3.28 (compared to 1.3.27) are:
* Added new ap_register_cleanup_ex() API function which allows
for a "magic" cleanup function to be run at register time
rather than at cleanup time. * Improvements to mod_usertrack that allows for a regular (verbose)
as well as "compact" version of the tracking cookie (the new
'CookieFormat' directive), and the ability to prepend a string
to the cookie via the 'CookiePrefix' directive.New features that relate to specific platforms:
* Introduce Win32 .pdb diagnostic symbols into the Apache 1.3 build
(as created in Apache 2.0.45 and later.) which makes debugging and
analysis of crash dumps and Dr. Watson logs trivial.
* AIX: Change the default accept mutex mechanism from pthread back to
fcntl.
Bugs fixed
The following noteworthy bugs were found in Apache 1.3.27 (or earlier)
and have been fixed in Apache 1.3.28:
* Make sure the accept mutex is released before calling child exit
hooks and cleanups.* Fix mod_rewrite's handling of absolute URIs. The escaping routines
now work scheme dependent and the query string will only be
appended if supported by the particular scheme.
* Prevent obscenely large values of precision in ap_vformatter
from clobbering a buffer. * Update timeout algorithm in free_proc_chain. If a subprocess
did not exit immediately, the thread would sleep for 3 seconds
before checking the subprocess exit status again. In a very
common case when the subprocess was an HTTP server CGI script,
the CGI script actually exited a fraction of a second into the 3
second sleep, which effectively limited the server to serving one
CGI request every 3 seconds across a persistent connection.-- ======================================================================= Jim Jagielski [|] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [|] http://www.jaguNET.com/ "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither" - T.Jefferson
