From section 8.1.2.2:

Clients SHOULD NOT pipeline requests using non-idempotent methods or
non-idempotent sequences of methods (see section 9.1.2).

And the reference to 9.1.2:

Methods can also have the property of "idempotence" in that (aside
from error or expiration issues) the side-effects of N > 0 identical
requests is the same as for a single request. The methods GET, HEAD,
PUT and DELETE share this property. Also, the methods OPTIONS and
TRACE SHOULD NOT have side effects, and so are inherently idempotent.

Starting of, pipelining requests is a SHOULD NOT and not a MUST NOT so it can be ignored. Second, from my understanding of all this if the actual method is idempotent for a specific resource the “requirement” would be filled with POST requests as well.

Assumptions have to be made or I need to improve my logic and/or english skills but apparently I’m not the only one being confused, the HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ at the netlib project page on mozilla.org says that PUT should not be pipelined.

In real life I stumbled across an job opportunity at Norman working on the Norman Network Protection product. Have just been working there for a couple of weeks now but it is indeed very interesting!

On the computer front Andreas packaged the 0.1.12 pekwm release which includes a set of bug-fixes and better tab-completion in the command dialog. Septic has gotten a python companion, peptic which now is handling the mailing lists for pekwm. I’ve also put down some work on my python log tailer/parser/syslog/web frontend utility plog preparing a 0.1.0 release, 0.1.0rc1 is out.

Most of the smells are worth noting and taking into account, some examples include:

• C5: Commented-Out Code
• G5: Duplication
• G20: Function Names Should Say What They Do

If you haven’t read it. :)

The current release is 0.1.5, which is known to work under Ubuntu Linux, OS X, OpenSolaris and OpenBSD. Check it out!

To get started with the targeted policies have a look at the selinux and httpd_selinux manual pages:

$ man selinux
$ man httpd_selinux

Those two manual pages should give enough information to get started.

Something I find myself wanting to do is enabling CGI script to execute and then granting those scripts access to files. To run /path/to/file.cgi as a CGI script reading data from /path/to/read/directory and writing to /path/to/write/directory execute:

# chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /path/to/file.cgi
# chcon -t httpd_sys_script_ro_t -R /path/to/read/directory/
# chcon -t httpd_sys_script_rw_t -R /path/to/write/directory/

For debugging purposes SELinux for Apache can be disabled by:

# setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 0
# service httpd restart

To list out what contexts files have use the -Z for ls:

$ ls -Z

For some more information on the subject check out:

• Apache and SELinux

Not providing any solution here, but it seems as if it is harder to give people a sense of quality and motivation to do a good job compared to improving their skills…

Conclusion, as always, user interface design is tricky and for some things an extra configuration option is worth it!