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.
