We've not really given Apache Week any priority in the last few months -- in fact we've not posted a new issue since October 2004. So I'm glad we didn't rename it Apache Month. Time to register apachewhenthereissomethinginteresting.com.
Anyway, the most useful thing that I've kept up to date in Apache Week is the database of vulnerabilities that affects the Apache Web server v1.3 and v2.0. This list was even being linked to directly by httpd.apache.org so I made good on a promise I made a year ago and moved the database to the official site. Apache Week uses xslt for transforming the database, but the Apache site used velocity for page markup, but no one seemed to mind me adding ant-trax.jar to the site so the database gets converted from xslt to the page format that gets marked up by velocity. The end result is a couple of nice HTML pages on the official Apache site that list all the vulnerabilities that is easy for us to keep up to date.
As I was commiting the template for this weeks issue of Apache Week I noticed that it has now been exactly eight years since I wrote the first issue. Back then Apache wasn't so popular and the documentation was lacking. Apache Week was designed specifically to give administrators the confidence to try the Apache web server on their machines without having to parse the hundreds of messages each week on the developer mailing list. That first issue was written over a 64k ISDN dial-up line from a computer perched on stark IKEA tabletop. Friday afternoons were spent writing up what had happened during the week. Not much has changed. Actually, I think that IKEA tabletop is still sitting in storage somewhere at Red Hat in Guildford. I wish I'd kept hold of it, it would have been useful for my girlfriends sons train layout.
Over the years there have been many times when we've thought about stopping production, usually when a competitor announced some other Apache magazine that we thought would do a better job than we do. But most of them gave up. They probably realised that there wasn't any money to be made from an Apache httpd journal.
UK Web became C2Net which became Red Hat, and Apache Week is still going strong. We'll have to think of something exciting to do for our tenth birthday.
Had an interesting week wading through vulnerability details and the various advisories which never really seem to match the facts. Take one Linux vendor for example who got confused about the Oracle mod_dav vulnerability and, even though they were not affected by the vulnerability, released new Apache mod_dav packages. To add to the confusion their newly released errata packages had actually added a patch which added in the vulnerability. So they started out not vulnerable, but then released a patch which was meant to remove the vulnerability but actually really made them vulnerable. No wonder folks are confused. Wrote a bit of a rant about it in Apache Week this week.
