>Number: 5263
>Category: general
>Synopsis: Appending a '/' followed by junk to a valid url does NOT cause
>an error
>Confidential: no
>Severity: non-critical
>Priority: medium
>Responsible: apache
>State: open
>Class: sw-bug
>Submitter-Id: apache
>Arrival-Date: Fri Nov 5 14:40:00 PST 1999
>Last-Modified:
>Originator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Organization:
apache
>Release: 1.3.6
>Environment:
Solaris 7, fully patched. sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
>Description:
My site is running Infoseek's UltraSEEK search engine. In the process of its
indexing, I noticed a problem in the way Apache parses URLs. The best way to
describe this is with an example. This is a CORRECT URL:
http://www.nara.gov/regional/seattle.html
However, due to a badly-coded link, the search engine tried urls like:
http://www.nara.gov/regional/seattle.html/volunteer/contacts/seainfo.html
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
And oddly enough, these worked! Apache always returned the original page
(seattle.html), even with the "junk" appended to the URL (the ^underlined^ part
of the URL). I would have expected Apache to return a 404. This is wreaking
havoc with the search engine because it's going into infinite loops and
indexing pages (like the seattle.html page) millions of times. Also, this
messes up what the browser thinks the document's base URL is, so images are
broken on these pages.
This seems to happen even on your own site:
http://www.apache.org/index.html/blah/lasdkj/asdjhkjasjad
returns the same page as http://www.apache.org/index.html
I have also tried this with IIS and Netscape Enterprise Server--both of which
return 404.
>How-To-Repeat:
(see full description for more examples)
http://www.apache.org/index.html/blah/lasdkj/asdjhkjasjad
returns the same page as
http://www.apache.org/index.html
instead of an error.
>Fix:
My guess is that Apache is allowing certain delimiters after the .html that it
shouldn't. '?' obviously should work, but I don't think '/' should, at least
not for non-CGI pages.
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:
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