Re: 404's to robots.txt?

André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> · Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:03:54 +0200

Evan Platt wrote:

So I've noticed quite a lot of connections from web spider programs. 

I've had a robots.txt

(User-agent: *

Disallow: /)  For a long time. But looking closer in my apache logs, am 

I reading right that it's giving a 404?

65.55.106.173 - - [21/Jul/2009:09:44:43 -0700] "GET /robots.txt 

HTTP/1.1" 404 208 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

65.55.106.112 - - [21/Jul/2009:10:11:43 -0700] "GET /robots.txt 

HTTP/1.1" 404 208 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

65.55.106.166 - - [21/Jul/2009:11:03:35 -0700] "GET /robots.txt 

HTTP/1.1" 404 208 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

65.55.106.160 - - [21/Jul/2009:11:09:07 -0700] "GET /robots.txt 

HTTP/1.1" 200 28 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

65.55.106.180 - - [21/Jul/2009:11:35:34 -0700] "GET /robots.txt 

HTTP/1.1" 404 208 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

Same day, no changes made:

X.X.X.X - - [21/Jul/2009:16:47:44 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 

- "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) 

Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.0.7, Ant.com Toolbar 1.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Z.Z.Z.Z- - [21/Jul/2009:16:49:10 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 

28 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) 

AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.30 Safari/530.5"

Two different IP's. One myne, one a friends.

Any suggestions as to why (if I'm reading the log right) I'm handing out 

a 404 to it appears just web crawlers?

# httpd -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.3
Server built:   Jun 16 2009 11:28:50

Don't know what other information is needed to help troubleshoot... 

Running on a os//x box.

http://www.espphotography.com/robots.txt if you want to take a look...

I had a look, can access it also.

Maybe you should look in your error.log, to check /why/ it refuses the 

other ones ?

Maybe there is another rule in your config that disallows that other 

client's address, or user-agent ?

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