kasia in a nutshell

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.

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.

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

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

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

What were they thinking?

they werent

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."

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.

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.

er, s/202/200/