Re: Is there user Anna at your host ?

[Heikki Korpela <heko () iki fi>]

Bill Munger wrote on "Re: Is there user Anna at your host ?": 
> The usefulness of this method is very limited. The numeric response code 
> (200, 403, 404, 500 etc) that apache sends along with a custom error page 
> remains unchanged. 

If you use an URL instead of a pathname, the user will always get a 302 / 200
reply.

% lynx -mime_header -head 'http://localhost/no/such/url' | grep HTTP
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
% lynx -mime_header -head 'http://localhost/images/' | grep HTTP
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

% echo 'ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/sample.html' >> /var/www/conf/httpd.conf
% echo 'ErrorDocument 403 http://localhost/sample.html' >> /var/www/conf/httpd.conf
% sudo apachectl restart
/usr/sbin/apachectl restart: httpd restarted
% lynx -mime_header -head 'http://localhost/no/such/url' | grep HTTP
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
% lynx -mime_header -head 'http://localhost/images/' | grep HTTP
HTTP/1.1 302 Found

% perl -pi -e 's|ErrorDocument 40([34]) http://localhost/sample.html|ErrorDocument 40\1 /sample.html|' 
/var/www/conf/httpd.conf
% sudo apachectl restart
/usr/sbin/apachectl restart: httpd restarted
% lynx -mime_header -head 'http://localhost/images/' | grep HTTP
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
% lynx -mime_header 'http://localhost/no/such/url'   
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 17:59:40 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.19
Last-Modified: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 17:50:02 GMT
ETag: "5-16-3ba0f1ca"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 22
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Hi, I'm a sample page


Of course, this will break up some sites where automated tools (e.g.,
a client that fetches a source tarball from somewhere) may rely on the 
status code for proper operation. In general, 
ErrorDocument <status code> <URL> is bad.