This is to announce the release of Pound v0.9. New in this release: - Added support for listening on multiple ports/addresses (please see the man page for new configuration directives) - Added support for lock/unlock (required for WebDAV). There is a new configuration option for allowing these requests to pass through. - Support for "old-style" HTTP responses, where the content is simply between the headers and EOF. This was necessary for people who access Pound through Squid. - Fixed a serious problem on FreeBSD: the pthreads implementation defined too small a stack size. - Fixed a small problem in URL parsing. What is Pound (from the Web page) - a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers. - a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information. - an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end browsers. - an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones. - an HTTP/1.1 to 1.0 proxy. - a fail-over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers. - a request redirector - it will pass client requests to separate groups of servers, based on required URL (pattern matching) Pound was specifically developed to serve as a front-end for multiple instances of Zope running on top of a common ZEO storage, but can be used with any other web server. A patch for the Python source of z2.py is available as part of the distribution to allow using Pound's SSL capabilities. For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound The software is at version 0.9 (beta quality). Further testing (especially under heavy loads), improvements and suggestions are welcome. Pound is distributed under the GPL. Enjoy and let me know how it works for you. P.S. - from following the discussions on this list and some questions we received it seems like some people consider the VHM as something to be used only in conjunction with the Apache mod_proxy. That is simply not true - the VHM works perfectly well on its own: just click on the mappings tab and set whatever mappings you require. VHM will translate requests and responses happily back and forth, including the nasty base tag and absolute URLs (such as in images). -- Robert Segall Apsis GmbH Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707 Tel: +41-1-920 4904