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Hiawatha, first impresions

clau
3 May 2007, 04:03
Hi, Hugo,

and congraatulations for you work. I' m new to Hiawatha, first ./configure, make install package about 2 weeks ago, on a FreeBSD box, while looking for something/everything else than Apache, Litespeed, Lighttpd or Nginx (upgraded to 5.8 already ).
While simple (one of your goals), it remains secure and flexible, giving enough config options (nice one the newroot utility, tough it's just a start, i guess). Some sort of rewrite engine implementation would be really useful, what do you think? Any plans regarding this?
Thank you for Hiawatha, and for keeping it free.

Regards, clau.

PS: It's sad to see all those bots polluting this place. Darn bots...
Hugo Leisink
4 May 2007, 18:21
Hi Clau,

Sorry for all the spam messages, I was on vacation last week. I usually keep my forum very clean.

I have no plans to implement rewrite rules. I've seen lots of security issues with bad written rewrite rules (I work as a security auditor). I think a well written website doesn't need rewrite rules. Take a look at Skeleton [skeleton.leisink.org] for some ideas. And if you really need some rewritting, you can also use the ErrorHandler option in Hiawatha. This specifies the file (or CGI) to use when an error occurs (for example a 404 File Not Found). You can make a CGI ErrorHandler write 301 errors with the 'rewrite' URL. This works the same as rewrite rules, but it's much more secure.
clau
5 May 2007, 20:42
... if you really need some rewritting, you can also use the ErrorHandler option in Hiawatha. This specifies the file (or CGI) to use when an error occurs (for example a 404 File Not Found)...

True, nice workaround (along with Skeleton), thank you.
"Hiawatha, pragmatism in webserving", this should be your motto
Tell me, please, how will Hiawatha scale over multiple processors, if it will at all (i'm not that C/C++ geek to guess it by reading the source)?
Hugo Leisink
5 May 2007, 23:44
Tell me, please, how will Hiawatha scale over multiple processors, if it will at all (i'm not that C/C++ geek to guess it by reading the source)?

It will scale very well. Hiawatha is a multi-threaded application. Every connection is handled by a separate thread.
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