Apache and Microsoft have been working quite closely. Both on a win-win situation.  Microsoft treats Apache as their technical research and Apache treats Microsoft as a support for building and taking technologies to another level. This is one collaboration which I really like.. Any open source foundation if backed by a Big Fish is a major success.  Most committers are on a job in their respective companies and working dedicated for Apache! Why? Because the company they work for uses apache products heavily

The event was a 2 day Barcamp & 3 day ApacheCon together. 2-6 November at Marriott Conventional Center , City Center of Oakland. Oakland is pretty cheap compared to San Francisco. Nothing much to see here apart from a good lake(which I missed). You might want to avoid going to West Oakland. Google for “How not to get shot in Oakland”.

The conference had speakers and committers from all around the globe. For those of you who don’t know who a committer. He is a person who will do the actual release and commit the code. Contributers from anywhere can submit code and patches, Its the job of a committer to do the release. There are more than 5-6 committers per project. At least 2-3 committers should review one another’s code and agree to the release of the code so that the release is watched by more than a single eye!

A good project in apache has a good adoption rate. For example Apache Tomcat for Java servlet has a 10,000 downloads per day! And the figures are like this and increasing over the last two years! Now that’s something cool.. ain’t it?

Its the 10th year of the Foundation. Apache has grown to a full scale Open Source foundation which has not only proved that Open source works! , but its processes and operations has made a mark on how an organization should run. Hats Off to you guys! Everything is very process oriented in Apache. They have very formal structure like any other company, but with a major touch of community development.

After all , social networking and community development is all that matters in the end.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

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When you do restart of apache, it will kill all the current sessions. But with apachectl you have option to restart the server gracefully without killing any previous sessions. This way all further connections will take up the new settings.

I’ve been doing this for a small little experiment, I wanted to add dynamic subdomains, So I had to edit the apache host httpd.conf files and we all know we have to restart the server after any config file is changed. So here’s an alternative. Change the config files from your PHP or CGI etc, and then call this apachectl.

The command is :  apachectl graceful

For Ubuntu and debian system the command would be : apache2ctl graceful

Here are some quick references from Apache’s official page:

start

Start the Apache httpd daemon. Gives an error if it is already running. This is equivalent to apachectl -k start.

stop

Stops the Apache httpd daemon. This is equivalent to apachectl -k stop.

restart

Restarts the Apache httpd daemon. If the daemon is not running, it is started. This command automatically checks the configuration files as in configtest before initiating the restart to make sure the daemon doesn’t die. This is equivalent to apachectl -k restart.

fullstatus

Displays a full status report from mod_status. For this to work, you need to have mod_status enabled on your server and a text-based browser such as lynx available on your system. The URL used to access the status report can be set by editing the STATUSURL variable in the script.

status

Displays a brief status report. Similar to the fullstatus option, except that the list of requests currently being served is omitted.

graceful

Gracefully restarts the Apache httpd daemon. If the daemon is not running, it is started. This differs from a normal restart in that currently open connections are not aborted. A side effect is that old log files will not be closed immediately. This means that if used in a log rotation script, a substantial delay may be necessary to ensure that the old log files are closed before processing them. This command automatically checks the configuration files as in configtest before initiating the restart to make sure Apache doesn’t die. This is equivalent to apachectl -k graceful.

configtest

Run a configuration file syntax test. It parses the configuration files and either reports Syntax Ok or detailed information about the particular syntax error. This is equivalent to apachectl -t.

The following additional option is available, but deprecated.

startssl

This is equivalent to apachectl -k start -DS