Site Hosting Update : The Proxy Wars

 

This site hosting thing really is the gift that keeps giving. 🙂

I wrote a little over a week ago about an outstanding issue with the website, which seemed to be related to people’s company proxy servers, rather than my web server. While I was staying at the Sofitel, I started to get the issue where the HTTP address for my website was giving me the following error.

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

By the time I was in a position to look at it, I had already moved to the Hilton, which did not exhibit the same problem. After Googling around and discounting the obvious stuff, like missing pages, bad configuration and file/directory permission issues, I came across a reference to some proxy servers (including Squid) producing the same error because they use HTTP 1.0 rather than HTTP 1.1. A suggestion to solve this was to set the following in the “/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” file.

SetEnv force-response-1.0

If a HTTP 1.0 request is sent to Apache, this setting will make sure a HTTP 1.0 response is sent back. Any HTTP 1.1 requests are dealt with in the normal fashion. It sounded like it was worth a try, but I had no way to test the impact. That is until Eric Grancher contacted me to say his hotel had the same issue. I added the setting and asked him to check again. Problem solved…

So I think/hope that issue is solved now… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.