Op Tue, 7 Aug 2007, schreef Jeff Rogers:
> Daniël Mantione wrote: > > > I think a few reasons contribute to the low popularity of AOLserver > > * It interoperates badly with Apache. Both need port 80. While solutions > > exits, none is ideal, and none come with "Batteries included". > > Many people (most) cannot rely 100% on AOLserver, despite ocnsidering > > it > > superior for web development. > > I think this may be more of a marketing issue than a technical one. What does > apache do that aolserver doesn't? If have had very few situations that could rely 100% on AOLserver. Be it PHP scripts (yes, I know you can install PHP in AOLserver), multi-user requirements or political issues. > Ok, there are alot of C modules written for > apache. How many of these are in high demand? Other than the programming > language ones which others are addressing, I'd guess very few, like mod_auth, > mod_include, mod_fastcgi, mod_cgi, and *gag* mod_rewrite. AOLserver can do > all of these things just fine, although as you say there is no 'batteries > included' modules for handling some of them. There is no major technical issue with AOLserver. Not at all. The devil is in the details. There are social issues at work (of which some might be addressable with minor technical interventions). > > * It is bad in multi-user environments. You cannot give every use his own > > space to develop his website in. Actually this problem seems easy to > > solve, since AOLserver can run multiple instances of itself since 4.0. > > You can very easily give each user his own space to develop a website in > (e.g., ~/public_html) Correct, I did this on one of my systems. > the only problem is if they want to do things as > themself rather than as the aolserver uid, since AFAIK setuid and threads do > not interact well. ... and there is one TCL library, all databases need to be configured globally, cgi scripts cannot be run with user permissions and more. For multi-user systems, Apache is superior. > A solution could be built using nsproxy with the proxy > running setuid as the desired user and sate interps for user ADPs or something > along those lines but it would be a fair amount of work that no one seems to > be asking for right now. Yes, this is one of the solutions. It can technically be done, in multiple ways, it is even doable, but that is not the point. There is competition on port 80, and you need to have a good story to convince your sysadmin (or find concensus in your open source project) to replace Apache with AOLserver on port 80. Again, a social issue. > What do you mean by running multiple instances of itself? Back in the old > (3.4) days I used nsvhr to proxy to a few completely separate servers running > as separate users which worked mostly ok (there were some lingering networking > bugs in nsvhr that I was never able to squash) You can have one AOLserver that has multiple configuration files, TCL libraries, ..., each serving a different domain. See http://panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/Virtual_Hosting Make this implicit (i.e. give a command line option so each user can automatically have his own config file, tcl library, etc.), and installing AOLserver on a server rather than Apache becomes feasible for a hosting provider. > However the server tends to > grow in memory size over time and running multiple independent servers just > worsens the problem. I restart my AOLserver at 04:00 each night, which is enough to elmininate the problem, but this is indeed an issue for current users. I believe it has little to do with popularity, though. Daniël -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
