Modification to Apache for www.washington.edu

The UW Technology WWW systems use Apache httpd 1.1 with modifications for the www.washington.edu cluster, which in this document is referred to as UW Technology Apache. These changes include:

Document root path searching

UW Technology Apache has the ability to search multiple directories for documents. Stock Apache allows only one directory to be the Document_Root. This has been enhanced to allow a path of directories, and each will be searched (in the order given) for a document.

When a directory path is defined, UW Technology Apache will apply each document root to the request until it either finds a match or has no more directories to try. If the resulting path is a regular file, no more special processing is done. If it is a directory, however, the files index.html, index.htm, and index.cgi are looked for in that directory, in that order. For example, assuming the document root path is defined as:

/www/uw /www/world
and /www/uw/cambots and /www/world/cambots both exist as directories. The file index.html only exists in /www/world/cambots, but the file image.gif exists in both directories. The following will occur when a client requests /cambots/: A request for /cambots/image.gif will return /www/uw/cambots/image.gif since that file exists.

Extended Logging

UW Technology Apache logs more information than the stock Apache. In addition to client host, remote username, given user name, time, the HTTP request string, the return code, and the number of bytes transferred, UW Technology Apache will log:

Redirects Issued via Symbolic Links

If you wish to issue a redirect for a file, you can make it a symbolic link to the URL to which a redirect should be issued. For example, if you wish to issue a redirect to http://somehost/somefile.html whenever the file localfile is accessed, you would do:
ln -s http://somehost/somefile.html localfile

Conditional HTML

Conditional HTML (chtml) is not part of the standard Apache distribution.