Forum Moderators: phranque
In my raw logs it looks like someone tries to access a page in my cgi-bin that does not exist, but it returns a 301 and shows my own site as the referer but without the www. Most times another request follows asking for a 404.html which also does not exist but returns a 404.
So why does it show mydomain.com as the referer and why does it give a 301 for a page that isn't there?
I redirect non www pages to www pages, if that has anything to do with it.
And should I fix it or just ignore it?
because
> I redirect non www pages to www pages.
If your logs are showing your own site as the referrer, then that indicates a secondary problem, since the client should still be sending the original referrer. But since this client is likely malicious, it may be simply be badly-coded.
You should also try requesting some URLs from your site that do not exist, using the proper www domain. Make sure you get a proper 404 response, and not a warning that "Additionally, another error was encountered while trying to server the error document" or similar. If you see this kind of warning, it indicates that you have defined a custom 404 error page using ErrorDocument, but that error page does not exist.
I suggest that you use Firefox and the "Live HTTP Headers" add-on. Firefox's error messages are usually clearer than IE's, and viewing the actual HTTP response headers returned with 404 errors (and others) may alert you to additional configuration problems.
Jim
