The SFMTA has various archival documents on the www.sfmta.com website which we need to retain without modification for public disclosure. As the documents have the potential of being mistaken for current information, I put in a feature in which a request that comes in without a referer from a document's parent directory will be shown a warning page informing the requestor that the document is archival. They can then follow an altered link to the document which will not require an authorized referer.
I had to back this change out because it turns out that when Internet Explorer (and possibly other browsers) do this download, it sends a referer for the initial request but then sends additional partial requests without the referer. So the first part of the file gets downloaded, then requests for additional parts of the file get redirected to the warning page, causing Internet Explorer to freeze. The question is, is there a way I can indicate to mod_rewrite that this is a follow-up partial request -- that is, detect the range request header -- and that it is not to do a rewrite of the URL? I plan to separately report this as a bug to Microsoft, but in the meantime, site visitors need to be able to access the file without freezing their browser. So the question is, is there a way I can prevent the rewrite in the case of a partial request? Details follow: Example file of interest: http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/documents/2-15-11Item11.pdf Example referer: http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/SFMTABoardFeb.152011SpecialMeetingagenda.h tm .htaccess rewrite code for the /cms/cmta/documents directory (currently backed out): RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?sfmta\.com/cms/cmta/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://sfmta\.securesites\.net/cms/cmta/ [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^giveMeTheArchive$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cms/asystem/302-archive-warning.php?request=/cms/cmta/documents/$1 [R] www.sfmta.com/cms/asystem/302-archive-warning.php?request=/cms/cmta/docu ments/2-15-11Item11.pdf will give a warning page which produces a sanitized link to http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/documents/2-15-11Item11.pdf?giveMeTheArchi ve Server log for a sample Internet Explorer request: Request 1 at 9:21:06 PT: GET /cms/cmta/documents/2-15-11Item11.pdf HTTP/1.1 Referer: http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/SFMTABoardFeb.152011SpecialMeetingagenda.h tm Result: 200 OK status, 751,863 bytes Request 2 at 9:21:07 PT: GET /cms/cmta/documents/2-15-11Item11.pdf HTTP/1.1 Referer: - Result: 303 See Other status, 253 bytes Request 3 at 9:21:07 PT GET /cms/asystem/302-archive-warning.php?request=/cms/cmta/documents/2-15-11 Item11.pdf HTTP/1.1 Referer: - Result: 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable status, 230 bytes Well, of course there is a 416, since the request is no longer for the PDF but for the warning page. But it's a moot point, since the task was in trouble as of request 2 when it came in without a referer, even though it's a follow-up on request 1, which did have the referer, and got redirected. Hope this helps, Charles Belov SFMTA Webmaster --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@httpd.apache.org
