>Number: 640 >Category: general >Synopsis: ErrorDocument returns redirects >Confidential: no >Severity: serious >Priority: medium >Responsible: apache (Apache HTTP Project) >State: open >Class: sw-bug >Submitter-Id: apache >Arrival-Date: Fri May 30 12:40:05 1997 >Originator: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Organization: apache >Release: 1.2b10 >Environment: SunOS 4.1.4, built using gcc 2.7.2.1, SunOS vortis 4.1.4 5 sun4 >Description: The ErrorDocument configuration option returns redirects for non-existent pages, when an absolute URL is specified. This is hinted at in the documentation, but I feel it is a serious problem, as it can lead to servers where every incorrect document on the server looks, to a search engine, like it is a correct (if redirected) response.
This behaviour merges the 4xx and 3xx return codes until they are virtually useless. >How-To-Repeat: Go to any site with an external ErrorDocument and look at the response from an incorrect URL. >Fix: Either get rid of this (I can see way this would be hard though :-), or include a warning in the documentation about how bad it is to return a redirect for a document that doesn't really exist >Audit-Trail: >Unformatted:
