Enfold Proxy Changes

Enfold Proxy Changes

Enfold Proxy Changes

This lists the changes that have occurred in Enfold Proxy since previous releases.

Release Notes

Version 5.2 (March 2010)

  • Added an error message if you try to install Enfold Proxy when IIS is not running. When installing, IIS must be running for the installation to be configured correctly. This error message will appear if you run the Check function on the Enfold Proxy configuration panel (or the equivalent command line utility).
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused a discrepancy between the proxy definitions appearing in the EP configuration panel and the proxy definitions appearing in the eep.ini configuration file.
  • Removed duplicate words in the cache headers.
  • Added a warning message if you include a value for vh_server and vh_hosts in eep.ini. (vh_hosts is for load balancing while vh_server is not. They should not be used together). This warning message will appear if you run the Check function on the Enfold Proxy configuration panel (or the equivalent command line utility).

Version 5.1 (November, 2009)

  • Fixed bug that caused Enfold Proxy (EP) to merge multiple cookies, with the same "expire" value applied to both cookies.
  • Added updated documentation including a section on cache headers and caching strategies.

Version 5.0 (July, 2009)

New features include:

  • Enfold Proxy has been rearchitected to use WSGI.
  • Enfold Proxy now supports caching responses other than 200. Meaning Redirects, Not Found and other HTTP responses can be cached.
  • The Windows Install wizard now detects the machine's Windows version and provides a link to instructions specific to that Windows version.
  • Enfold Proxy configuration checking tool (eep_check.exe) is stricter and provides better feedback.
  • Enfold Proxy configuration utility now has a support tab that will automatically zip all log files and place them on the users desktop
  • XSLT caching now works on 64 bit Windows versions.

Other improvements and changes:

  • Enfold Proxy 5 now requires IIS 6 or higher. Windows XP, Windows 2000 or earlier are no longer supported. Windows 2003, Vista and Windows 2008 are supported.
  • X-Cache-Hit accurately reflects the age of a cached item.
  • Bug in encontrol which resulted in MAX. Log rollover size to not be written correctly to configuration file.
  • Connection: response header may have "Close, Close" as value; this is no longer possible.
  • Increase the default timeout for remote server from 90 seconds to 180 seconds
  • There are no longer _Plone virtual directory created in the IIS Manager
  • Proxy log analyzer tool improvements, check --help

Version 4.7 (April, 2009)

  • Cache storage had a possibility of having different date representations which could reduce effectiveness of cache.
  • Improvements around IIS worker process recycling.
  • Removed asynchronous logging capability which could generate incorrect logs.
  • Fixed a race condition which could cause EP to become unresponsive upon IIS startup.
  • Added a eep.ini configuration for thread_pool_shutdown_timeout.

Version 4.6 (January, 2009)

  • Enfold Proxy will no longer attempt to 'prime' the EP cache by modifying incoming client requests; in certain cases, doing so led to poor performance. EP will not store an item in cache until the first non-conditional request for that page comes from a client.
  • Minor tweaks to the wording on encontrol, error messages and docs.
  • Documented a method for making 64 bit EP run in 32 bit mode.

Version 4.5 (October, 2008)

  • The cache is now far more RFC compliant and returns all headers from the original request, except set-cookie. Increased RFC compliance makes it easier for Enfold Proxy to work with existing caching infrastructure and tools.
  • Natively runs as a 64 bit application within Internet Information Server 7 (IIS 7).
  • Official support for Vista 32 bit and Vista 64 bit.
  • All URLs are now correctly quoted and utf8-encoded URLs are supported. (Note: this may not be supported by the backend Zope/Plone server).
  • A new setting for the log files (called the Headers log level) makes it easier to read HTTP headers and verify that caching is taking place.

Other improvements and changes:

  • minor changes to the user interface and documentation
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused a response with an incorrect content-length to be returned (making some requests appear to hang).
  • Default setting for cache size is now 100MB (was 10MB) and default max cached item size is now 200k (was 100k).
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the cache to act as if it were full even when empty.
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the cache to leave "orphaned" files in the cache folder even after items were updated.

See also: Known Issues related to the 4.5 release.

Version 4.0 (May, 2008)

New features include:

  • Optimize server performance with statistics from a new log analysis tool.
  • Easily set up the server to create Web pages from XML files with XSLT processing.
  • Choose the level of support that's right for you with new annual subscriptions.

Other improvements:

  • Speeds error diagnosis during setup with a better configuration checking tool.
  • Improves proxy performance by reusing connections to the remote server.
  • Enables a cache purge to take place in the background, eliminating the need to stop the server.
  • Fixes a bug that degraded cache performance by leaving "stale" files in the cache directory.
  • Fixes a bug that prevented includes and excludes of names containing spaces.
  • Improved help can now be accessed from within the configuration tool.
  • Descriptions in the configuration tool uses the phrase "proxy definition" instead of the more ambiguous word "host" from previous versions.

Bug Fixes:

  • New 'ep_log_analyzer' tool to extract statistics from EP log files.
  • New 'ep_cache_check' tool to check the consistency of the cache.
  • Fix a bug that caused a huge number of "stale" files in the cache directory, degrading performance of the cache. People upgrading from an earlier version of EP are recommended to use the ep_cache_check tool (see above) to check for and fix this problem.
  • Fix bug that prevented 'includes' and 'excludes' working when the URL is quoted.
  • Purge URLs in the background.
  • Reuse connections to the remote server when possible.
  • eep_check is now much smarter about how it connects to IIS for testing to handle the various site-matching configuration options provided by IIS.

Known Issues

As documentation is updated for Enfold Proxy after release, this topic will contain known issues and workarounds. To see the most recent known issues, check the Enfold website at http://www.enfoldsystems.com/software/proxy/docs/5.0/changes.html#known-issues .

List of Known Issues

  • EP Version 5.x now requires that IIS be running whenever you install/upgrade/uninstall. Otherwise errors may occur. Read more.

Searching through current & resolved issues

Enfold keeps a "collector" of ongoing issues related to products. (If you bought a subscription, you will have a login for the Priority Enfold Proxy Collector at https://entrack.enfoldsystems.com/browse/PROXYSUP). This not only lets you create issues of your own, it also allows you to view issues created by other clients as well.

There are two ways to browse through the Priority Proxy collector:

  1. Enter a specific term or phrase in the Search box at the top.
  2. Click one of the links under Project Summary or Open Issues on the right side. If browsing in this way, don't forget to browse through the Closed issues. Not only are there far more closed issues than open ones, but the closed issues often include solutions and advice from Enfold's technical support staff and sometimes even from developers.