December 30, 2003
Weird 404
This is by far the weirdest 404 I've ever seen.. took me a few minutes to realize I mistyped the url! Not very practical.
Posted December 30, 2003 05:46 PM in Geek Stuff
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Comments
On December 30, 2003 06:33 PM Jeremy Zawodny added:

Yeah, I've seen Frontier say some really weird shit when you mess up a URL. I think the people who created it sorta forogot that URLs are sometimes typed by actual humans.

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On December 30, 2003 07:33 PM Mark added:

Oh, it is so much worse than you think. These "error" pages are using the proper HTTP error codes (404 in this case). You can verify this with LiveHTTPHeaders, or lynx -dump -head, or any number of other ways. They use the standard 200 HTTP status code, which means (among other things) that Google indexes these pages:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+error+was+detected+by+frontier%22+mainresponder.respond

Frontier is the only web server I know of that doesn't implement 404 correctly.

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On December 30, 2003 07:35 PM Mark added:

Grr, that should read "these error pages are *not* using the proper HTTP error codes".

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On December 30, 2003 07:37 PM Mark added:

This seems to be a more representative sample of the problem:

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle%3Auserland+frontier+server+error

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On December 30, 2003 09:17 PM kasia added:

What were they thinking?

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On December 30, 2003 09:43 PM apokalyptik added:

they werent

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On December 30, 2003 09:45 PM fluffy added:

Looks like they just need to put an index.html into the default vhost's DocumentRoot saying "Oops, no weblog here! You or someone else probably mistyped the URL."

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On December 30, 2003 10:25 PM Mark added:

fluffy, they're not running Apache. It's another web server which implements a minimal subset of the HTTP specification. As you can see from the above queries, this is not an isolated problem.

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On December 31, 2003 04:43 PM fluffy added:

Right, I know that, but surely this is still a vhosting issue, considering the nature of the problem. Just translate from Apache-speak into Frontier-speak, if possible. Like, it just seems that there's no index.html in whichever directory Frontier is trying to access (assuming it's not just trying to access a nonexistent directory or whatever, in which case why would it be putting out a 'virtual indexes not allowed' error - which should be 403, not 202, granted - instead of a 404?).

Or, if that doesn't work, consider using an httpd whose vhost support doesn't totally suck.

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On December 31, 2003 04:43 PM fluffy added:

er, s/202/200/

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