• http://aolserver.github.com/
• http://github.com/aolserver

I’m hoping this will make it easier for people to fork the code, make their own individual changes, and share those changes with the rest of the community. I’m hoping this will effectively eliminate any previous barriers to contibution – fork the code on github as much as you’d like in your own account, share your changes with whoever you please.

Is this an “official” change? Of course not! The code still lives in CVS at SourceForge, like it always has – but now a copy with full CVS history is up at GitHub, as well. At this point, what does it mean to be “official” anyway, right?

As of right now, I’ve only imported the “aolserver” module from CVS into GitHub. Over the next several weeks, I plan to import all the modules from CVS, but this takes time.

A nice feature of GitHub is the included “Issues” system, their Wiki, and their static page hosting. If I get really ambitious, I might look to move as much of the AOLserver documentation as I can into the GitHub Pages area.

As usual, feel free to flame me for running off into the weeds and just doing something without “getting consensus” or “involving the community” but I’m hoping at least a few of you will find this work worthwhile. If you have any positive comments and/or suggestions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me: I’d love to hear what you think.

AOLserver’s not dead, yet. ;-)

The most important changes are:

• improved behavior under high load, when running out of resources
• better interface to Tcl I/O functions through providing access to Tcl file handles (allows asynchronous delivery)
• built-in version of ns_cache backward compatible with the old (now obsolete) aolserver module.
• various fixes for the build process

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the release notes and ChangeLog in the source distribution.

The following people have contributed to AOLserver 4.5.1 (in alphabetical order):

• Michael Andrews
• Jim Davidson
• Nathan Folkman
• Tom Jackson
• Gustaf Neumann
• Jeff Rogers
• Bas Scheffers
• Dossy Shiobara
• Daniel P. Stasinski

The source is freely available from the sourceforge.net site at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the release notes and ChangeLog in the source distribution.

The source is freely available from the sourceforge.net site at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the ChangeLog in the source distribution. A high level summary of the changes follows:

This release adds two enhancements and one API change. The major enhancement is the adding of configurable transparent gzip compression of HTTP responses from ADP pages. The minor enhancement is the addition of a numeric version #define to aid conditional compilation of modules that require specific AOLserver versions or must be compiled differently depending on the version. Ns_Compress() has been renamed to Ns_CompressGzip() in anticipation of other algorithms which will be supported.

The source is freely available from the sourceforge.net site at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the ChangeLog in the source distribution. A high level summary of the changes follows:

Bugfixes: a shutdown crash fix; a memory leak when using getaddrinfo; a server hang fix for ns_http; bad invocations of ns_schedule_{proc,daily,weekly} proc can crash the server; omit Content-Length header if ADP streaming is on; Ns_ConnSend() now does what the docs say it does.

Enhancements: a new Ns_Compress() to gzip data; a new Ns_SockCancelCallbackEx() to correctly cancel callbacks; enable writing of corefiles on Linux after setuid by setting PR_SET_DUMPABLE.

The source is freely available from the sourceforge.net site at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152.

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the ChangeLog in the source distribution.

On behalf of the AOLserver Team, I have the honor of announcing the
latest point release of AOLserver: 4.0.7.

This version is primarily a bug fix release following version 4.0.6.
A summary of changes is provided at the end of this document.

NOTE: This release corrects a serious flaw in 4.0.6 where a
non-compliant HTTP/1.1 request can crash the server, resulting in
a Denial of Service. Everyone is urged to skip the 4.0.6 release
and either remain on 4.0.5 or upgrade to 4.0.7 immediately.

WHAT IS AOLSERVER?

AOLserver is America Online’s Open-Source web server. AOLserver is
the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in
the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server
used for large scale, dynamic web sites.

Visit the project’s website:

http://aolserver.com/

HOW CAN I GET AOLSERVER?

Download the source code from SourceForge:

http://aolserver.com/downloads/aolserver-4.0.7-src.tar.gz

I FOUND A BUG! WHAT DO I DO?

File it in the Bug Tracker at SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=3152&atid=103152

IS THERE A MAILING LIST? WHERE’S THE USER COMMUNITY?

Yes! There’s an announcements-only and a general discussion mailing
list. Instructions on how to subscribe are here:

http://aolserver.com/lists.php

There is also a wiki-web set up for AOLserver:

http://aolserver.com/wiki/

CHANGES SINCE LAST RELEASE?

Fix bug where internal redirect for 401 omitted including the HTTP
auth. “WWW-Authenticate:” header. Fixes bug #674033.

Ns_GetAddrByHost() reports errors via Ns_Log(), so calls to it
should be done after Ns_Log has been initialized, otherwise very
unhelpful error messages are produced. In particular, this happens
when the server is started and the hostname as returned by
gethostname() cannot be resolved, because the network interface is
down AND no entry exists in /etc/hosts. Closes SF Bug #868362.

Setting request->method to static storage, which later gets
ns_free()’d in Ns_FreeRequest(), causes the server to crash.

This version is primarily a bug fix release following version 4.0.5.
A summary of changes is provided at the end of this document.

WHAT IS AOLSERVER?

AOLserver is America Online’s Open-Source web server. AOLserver is
the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in
the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server
used for large scale, dynamic web sites.

Visit the project’s website:

http://aolserver.com/

HOW CAN I GET AOLSERVER?

Download the source code from SourceForge:

http://aolserver.com/downloads/aolserver-4.0.6-src.tar.gz

I FOUND A BUG! WHAT DO I DO?

File it in the Bug Tracker at SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=3152&atid=103152

IS THERE A MAILING LIST? WHERE’S THE USER COMMUNITY?

Yes! There’s an announcements-only and a general discussion mailing
list. Instructions on how to subscribe are here:

http://aolserver.com/lists.php

There is also a wiki-web set up for AOLserver:

http://aolserver.com/wiki/

CHANGES SINCE LAST RELEASE?

Keepalive is enabled for response codes other than just 200 OK.

Change to make HTTP request “Host:” header mandatory for HTTP/1.1
connections by returning 400 Bad Request response. Closes SF Bug
#787728.

Changed virtual server code to use the “hostname” param from the
“ns/module/nssock” section to map the default virtual server based
on the value (hostname) from the “ns/module/nssock/servers” section,
when the “Host:” header is either not specified (HTTP/1.0) or is not
found in the virtual server table. Closes SF Bug #812036.

conn->headers can be NULL causing segfault. Closes SF Bug #990439.

Define ENOTSUP on OpenBSD 3.5. Closes SF Bug #985076.

Ns_GetMimeType() was returning defaultType instead of noextType if
the path contained a directory with a “.” but the filename component
had no extension. Closes SF Bug #739049.

Enable ADP/Tcl code to override Last-Modified: header from
ns_respond when -headers AND -file are specified. Closes bug
#879076.

Lots of refactoring of ns_respond code to remove duplication.

ns_eval of script containing comments (i.e., lines starting with
“#”) cause an error because $args is a list, which gets evaluated
differently than a plain string script. Closes SF Bug #833940.

Ensure that supplementary groups from /etc/group are set if -u
username is specified, or dropped if a uid is specified so that the
nsd doesn’t run with root’s supplementary groups. Closes SF Bug
#425401.

Trivial: eliminate one compiler warning.

Make the Tcl_Panic() message from Ns_TlsGet() and Ns_TlsSet()
include the full function name to aid in debugging.

Ensure synchronous signals are handled correctly under LinuxThreads.
Possible fix for SF Bug #982955.

Fix build on alpha arch, removing extra INT64 typedef. Closes bug
#896962.

ns_log can now log to a custom logger as well.

Unnecessary test for data != NULL actually caused part of bug
#971016 when fastpath.cache=false and fastpath.mmap=true and the
file requested is zero bytes, mmap() returns 0 which gets passed
along as data == NULL, causing ReturnCharData() to not flush the
queued headers. Removing the if is safe as Ns_WriteConn will simply
flush any queued data.

If nsend == 0, we would never call Ns_WriteConn to flush the queued
headers. This could happen when we’re sending zero bytes of data as
a response. This fixes bug #971016 in the case where
fastpath.cache=false and fastpath.mmap=false and a zero byte file is
requested.

One-liner fix for sending Content-Length header for content of zero
bytes. Closes SF Bug #971016.

The source is freely available from the sourceforge.net site at http://www.sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152.

For more information on the changes in this version please refer to the ChangeLog in the source distribution.

Thanks for all your efforts and contributions. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled, massively-scalable and extensible web server tuned for large scale, dynamic web sites. AOLserver also includes complete database integration and a dynamic page scripting language.

The source is freely available from sourceforge.net site http://www.sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3152.

This also contains a brief release notes. For more detailed description of “Whats new”, please refer to the hangeLog in the source distribution.