I recently deployed my node.js proxy server, removing all traces of Apache2 from my main server. During the course of this transition I discovered:

Bugs in my code

Not unexpected, in all honesty.

There were two main issues; the first was relating to how I handled the 304 response, the second was relating to how I performed rewrites for my mercurial repository vhost.

Bugs in node.js

Given how new node.js is there wasn't a huge surprise here either, although I thought I'd been good testing against 0.2.x. As it turned out I needed to run the more recent 0.4.x to avoid a couple of issues:

• HTTP headers are lower-cased
• ECONNREFUSED was not being caught the way that I expected.

In short I have a backported node.js package for Squeeze which is almost worthless. I'll update it in the near future. For the moment:

cd node-v0.4.3/
./configure --without-ssl --prefix=/opt/node-0.4.3 && make && make install
ln -fs /opt/node-0.4.3  /opt/node

Oddities in thttpd

thttpd is what actually runs my websites and I discovered during some extended debugging sessions that it just does not like HTTP requests starting with a doubled "/" character.

For example this works fine:

wget http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

But this fails:

wget http://www.acme.com//software/thttpd/

Previously it seems that Apache was (silently) fixing this up before it proxied requests. Now I have to do it myself, no big thing, but still a surprise.

All in all it was worth it to be able to run:

dpkg --purge libapache2-mod-rpaf \
             apache2.2-common \
             apache2.2-bin \
             apache2-utils \
             apache2-mpm-prefork \
             apache2 \
             libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 \
             libaprutil1-ldap \
             libaprutil1 \
             libapr1

ObQuote: "Bad news. The fog's getting thicker." - Airplane!

Tags: nodejs, thttpd | 4 comments