[cobalt-users] .htaccess and recursive error document statement

[Manuel.Schmitt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Manuel Schmitt)]

Hello all!

If you have a minute to help me and others that could encounter this problem
please think of this problem and post your opinion here.

Imagine. A customer creates its own .htaccess file on a server (RaQ or
standard-Linux) in the main folder, e.g. in its /web folder. It looks like

    ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domain.com/notfound.html

Then imagine that the file /web/notfound.html DOES NOT EXIST!!! Then think
what would happen if somebody tries to access a document that does not
exist. The webserver should forward to the error site, which does not exist,
which then leads into another 404 error and so on.

I am not absolutely sure, but on one our our servers we hat this problem and
it lead into the Apache reaching its limitations due to the httpd.conf
settings. So there we a very lot of httpd instances which caused the server
no longer serving. Only restarting the Apache did help.

Do you think that this scenario could be the reason for what we did
encounter? Within the log files we had a very strange error message

    [Sat Sep 15 20:35:18 2001] [error] [client 212.123.122.7] client denied
by serve
r configuration: /home/sites/site54/web/.html

and this entry came about hundred of times when the Apache was down, and
only for this one site. The only thing I cannot explain is the strange path
that is within the entry. Perhaps you can.


Regards,
Manuel Schmitt