Significant Changes

This document lists changes to the WASD VMS Hypertext Services Package that have some effect on configuration or behaviour. It lists changes from version 3.1 onwards, the first to be made available as freeware.

Version 4.3   (August 1997)

• MadGoat NETLIB support. As well as native Digital TCP/IP Services (UCX) support the server can now (potentially) support these packages:
  • CMU TCP/IP (VAX only) v6.5 or later
  • PathWay from Attachmate Inc., any version
  • TCPware from Process Software Corporation, any version
  • Cisco MultiNet for OpenVMS, any version

• Activity report. This provides a graphical representation of server activity (requests and bytes transfered) for up to the previous 28 days.

• DCL scripting now has greater CGI compliance. Prior to v4.3 POSTed scripts would read the request header then the body (i.e. the full request). The CGI standard is body-only. This is now the default. A configuration parameter allows the previous behaviour to be explicitly selected.

• Logging can now be enabled and disabled on an ad hoc basis from the Server Administration Menu.

• Some minor bugfixes and refinements.

Version 4.2   (July 1997)

• Change of name from "HFRD VMS Hypertext Services" to "WASD VMS Hypertext Services". This follows a change of role and name for the Division.

• CGI scripting redesigned to improve performance through the use of persistant DCL subprocedures. Some additional configuration parameters support the reworked DCL module.

• CGIplus scripting (minor extension to standard CGI scripting) to further improve CGI performance through the use of persistant CGI applications.

• Additional server administration reports on requests (current and history) and DCL/scripting.

Version 4.1   (April 1997)

• Documentation brought more-or-less  :^)  up-to-date.

• HTTP response headers now more consistant.

• Delete-on-close for temporary files. Primarily used by the UPDate facility for previewing documents. (Beware ... any file name comprising a leading hyphen, sixteen digits and a trailing hyphen will be deleted on close!)

Version 4.0   (February 1997)

• Very significant changes to internal data structures and processing.

• Changes to startup and login procedures to more easily support multiple servers within clusters.

• On-line server administration menu providing reports, configuration and run-time actions of server. Obsoletes some of the $ HTTPD/DO=... functionality previously available from the command. More extensive server reports, and much more, available via /httpd/-/admin/ (obsoletes /httpd/-/report/). These menus and dialogues generally require an HTML-table-capable browser, such as Netscape Navigator.

• Ability to configure server characterstics requires changes to the format of the HTTPD$CONFIG and HTTPD$AUTH files. Both are backward compatible, but if upgrading and using the on-line configuration the format will be changed the first time they are updated.

• HTTPd server becomes HTTP-cookie-aware.

Version 3.4   (October 1996)

• More extensive server reports (via /httpd/-/report/ ... obsoleted by v4.0)

• Minor changes to error reporting.

Version 3.3   (August 1996)

• ``Basic'' and ``Digest'' authentication and path authorization. The digest scheme has, to date, only been tested against NCSA X Mosaic 2.7-4b, which seems to behave a little flakey when reloading documents, and does not elegantly support stale nonces.

• A configurable module is provided to automatically convert variable to stream-LF record format files. The stream format is much more efficiently processed by the server. (VARIABLE and VFC are read record-by-record, all others in block mode).

• To allow controlled access using authorization the server report is now generated via a path, as in the anchor ``<A HREF=/httpd/-/report>'' (obsoleted by v4.0)

Version 3.2   (April 1996)

• The HTTPD$CONF configuration file no longer requires the encoding directive (7bit, 8bit, binary, etc.). This must be removed before upgrading from earlier versions. Encoding is now determined from the VMS file record format (VARIABLE and VFC are read record-by-record, all others in block mode).

• Persistent connections (HTTP/1.0 defacto standard) are now supported (for the majority of HTTP transactions). This significantly reduces request network overhead.

Version 3.1   (January 1996)

• Initial GNU Licensed freeware release.