November 20, 2004

Careful with Gentoo Apache 1.3.32...

According to the 1.3.33 anouncement Apache 1.3.32 was never formally released. That was quite a surprise to me as this server (running this and all the OpenInteract infrastructure) is marked as stable only and portage had announced the upgrade to be available. Unfortunately a bug in 1.3.32 (described best here) meant some parts of the OpenInteract JIRA refused to work when GET parameters were appended to the URL.

JIRA and this website run behind the well-used combination of mod_proxy and mod_rewrite. This allows the only web face to the world to be Apache -- requests to a particular host or url-space can be handed off to another (usually heavyweight) application server for processing, then any content and headers are sent back to the user through the lightweight front-end server. It has some additional benefits well documented in the older mod_perl guide. Unfortunately some part of the combination did some unfortunate URL munging such that the URL http://.../foo.jspa?bar=baz would be given to Tomcat as http://.../foo.jspa%3Fbar=baz, which it couldn't handle, complaining that the requested resource was not available.

Interestingly, mod_perl + OpenInteract2 (running this site) handled it just fine...

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