Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3
Compatibility Notes with NCSA's Server
While Apache is for the most part a drop-in replacement for NCSA's
httpd, there are a couple gotcha's to watch out for. These are mostly
due to the fact that the parser for config and access control files
was rewritten from scratch, so certain liberties the earlier servers
took may not be available here. These are all easily fixable. If you
know of other non-fatal problems that belong here, let us know.
Please also check the known
client problems page.
- As of Apache 1.3.1, methods named in a
<Limit>
section must be listed in upper-case. Lower- or mixed-case
method names will result in a configuration error.
- The basic mod_auth
AuthGroupFile
-specified group file
format allows commas between user names - Apache does not.
- If you follow the NCSA guidelines for setting up access
restrictions based on client domain, you may well have added
entries for,
AuthType, AuthName, AuthUserFile
or
AuthGroupFile
. None of these are
needed (or appropriate) for restricting access based on client
domain. When Apache sees AuthType
it (reasonably)
assumes you are using some authorization type based on username
and password. Please remove AuthType
, it's
unnecessary even for NCSA.
OldScriptAlias
is no longer supported.
exec cgi=""
produces reasonable malformed
header responses when used to invoke non-CGI scripts.
The NCSA code ignores the missing header. (bad idea)
Solution: write CGI to the CGI spec and use
include virtual
, or use exec cmd=""
instead.
- Icons for FancyIndexing broken - well, no, they're not broken,
we've just upgraded the icons from flat .xbm files to pretty and
much smaller .gif files, courtesy of Kevin Hughes at EIT. If you are using the same
srm.conf from an old distribution, make sure you add the new AddIcon, AddIconByType,
and DefaultIcon
directives.
- Apache versions before 1.2b1 will ignore the last line of configuration
files if the last line does not have a trailing newline. This affects
configuration files (httpd.conf, access.conf and srm.conf), and
htpasswd and htgroup files.
- Apache does not permit commas delimiting the methods in <Limit>.
- Apache's
<VirtualHost>
treats all addresses as
"optional" (i.e., the server should continue booting if it can't
resolve the address). Whereas in NCSA the default is to fail
booting unless an added optional
keyword is included.
- Apache does not implement
OnDeny
use
ErrorDocument
instead.
- Apache (as of 1.3) always performs the equivalent of
HostnameLookups minimal
. minimal
is not an
option to
HostnameLookups
.
- To embed spaces in directive arguments NCSA used a backslash
before the space. Apache treats backslashes as normal characters. To
embed spaces surround the argument with double-quotes instead.
- Apache does not implement the NCSA
referer
directive. See
PR#968 for a few brief suggestions on alternative ways to
implement the same thing under Apache.
- Apache does not allow ServerRoot settings inside a VirtualHost
container. There is only one global ServerRoot in Apache; any desired
changes in paths for virtual hosts need to be made with the explicit
directives, eg. DocumentRoot, TransferLog, etc.
More to come when we notice them....
Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3