new line added.

You can browse a WebDAV server in Windows XP and Vista using Windows Explorer. There is a problem though, Windows XP and Vista will try to use NTLM authentication (Active Directory) to authenticate with the server. If you configure your Apache WebDAV server with either no, basic or digest authentication, then you will hit a roadblock. Luckily Microsoft created the KB907306 patch. Unlucky for myself, other websites refer to the patch number missing the last digit ’6′. This will drive you crazy when you know you should be able to copy/paste the KB number in Google and quickly find the download page on microsoft.com. Other documents will say to search for KB90730. You should be searching for KB907306. You can search for “Software Update for Web Folders“, but you will also get a lot of other search results that are not nearly as helpful. Hopefully this blog post will save some folks the aggravation.

Now that you’re here, there is no need to search! The patch is available from the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=17c36612-632e-4c04-9382-987622ed1d64&DisplayLang=en

Don’t forget to E-mail comments and suggestions to compiledweekly AT gmail.com.

Links:

• Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide at Amazon
• Open Flash Charts

Download This Episode

Module Rewrite – URL Rewriting Guide

If you are looking for a cheat sheet, check out AddedBytes (previously I Love Jack Daniels)’ mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet for a Rewrite Module cheat sheet as well as others.

I’ve posted the source to the Lighttpd bug tracking system in hopes it will be added to a future version of Lighty.  http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/ticket/1446

This addition should help the Lighty web server to be capable of handling the appropriate HTTP status codes for all situations that may arise for the web site in question.

I did some research and came across Lighttpd web server, also known as Lighty.  Lighty took some time to figure out, but once I did I found the XML style configuration files were not hard to implement and understand.  I did find the rewriting to be rather limited in comparison to the mod_rewrite module found in Apache.  Never the less, I was able to duplicate the rewrite that I had in Apache in Lighty.  For my application, I did have to modify the Lighty source code that way redirects returned a 302 HTTP response (It defaulted to 301 without any way of changing in the configuration files).

After performing similar tests with the same server configured with Lighty, I found that Lighty could handle between 3,900-4,100 requests per second.  On top of this, memory usage was minimized to only a fraction of the total memory available on the server.  Processor usage did increase, but was not substantial enough to warrant the change.

I am currently experimenting with combining Lighty with Apache services on one server in order to utilize the best of both worlds.  See my post on the lighttpd.net forums: http://forum.lighttpd.net/topic/13830

Lighty may be able to also serve dynamic PHP files using FastCGI faster than Apache.  I am still concerned that PHP will not function correctly since it is not multi-threaded friendly.  I also have security concerns based on what I’ve seem with source code being exposed with a popular web site recently, I am not ready to take on that much risk.

So you just uploaded a tun of pictures to a web directory and you want a list of all the images.  Since the only types of files in the directory are images, the security risk of displaying the list diminishes.  In actuality, the list of images can be quite useful especially when trying to find a specific one.

The answer, create a 1 line .htaccess file with the following: Options Indexes

If you don’t have control over your apache configuration files and this option is not available to you, don’t fret.   Chris Snyder created an excellent php script that allows you to list the contents of a web directory.

Link: http://chxo.com/scripts/image-list.php

This script is very useful, I’ve customized it for my subversion repository in order to display a list of repositories in the root of the subversion web server.

The mod_deflate module in Apache is not new. What is new is the trend to use it. The deflate module uses gzip compression and is relatively fast in comparison to the bandwidth time. You can do the math, but if your page was 1MB and took 20 seconds to download, and compressed it is 250k and takes 1 second to compress, 5 second to download, and 2 second to decompress, the compression method is faster. You can crunch numbers till you are blue in the face, but the basic premise holds true.

First, you need to make sure the mod_deflate module is enabled in apache. Look for the line in your apache configuration files and uncomment:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Then add the following lines within a <Location> or <VirtualHost> section.

SetInputFilter DEFLATE

The above will compress everything. Instead of compressing everything, especially if you have a lot of files on your web site such as images, media, zip files, etc.. that are already compressed, you may want to only add compression for particular content types. To compress specific content types, replace the SetInputFilter with one or more of the following.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php

If you work with other content types such as application/xml, you can add those as well.

You can test your server by using the GID Network gzip test located here: http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

Now that your web server is using compression, you can focus on other things like programming or eating pizza.

cmd:

httpd -t
# or
/usr/sbin/httpd -t

If everything was entered correctly, you should see the following message printed: “Syntax OK”.

If there are errors, it will print the first one it finds and exits. Otherwise it will print all the warnings if any and then print the “Syntax OK” message.

If you keep each virtual host in a separate configuration files like I do, then you can check the specific httpd.conf file.

cmd:

httpd -t -f /path/to/virtual/httpd.conf