this is weird. Iphon Ipad throwing 403 errors. but check and ok.

[kahuna]

this is weird... Iphon Ipad throwing 403 errors.. but check and ok..

In this thread... I explain and why and how I set up in my cgi-bin directory so Gxxgle and Yxxhoo etc..
would not index my scripts being called in an iframe.. and thusly not be index, and only accessible directly for the user from the page they are on.
[webmasterworld.com...]

I had implemented this process February 27th.... it was only...
In the last week or so... Ipad and Iphone users are throwing the 403 error when they access the page with the iframe and script.

I use Droid. And no problems when I check my site on my phone or Droid tablet. No errors reported.

I wanted to check on a "live" Ipad or Iphone....
So I went to my local "big box" computer store, in the Apple department.. and played around with their Ipad.
And all came up nice and clean just like as if I was using a Droid device.

I came home... and checked my logs... and I know my time stamps and compare with my visit to the "big box" store..
And there they are.. a bunch of 403 errors.
Yet all was clean and nice at the "big box" store on their Ipads.

I posted over on the Apple forum... /browsers/Safari.. but it doesn't get visited very often or don't know if they are very savy particulary as this is a htaccess generated situation.
This isn't an exact double posting...
Here only where people have more knowledge about htaccess.

So does anybody have a clue what is going on ?
Thanks group...
Rob (looking at a bunch of 403's that don't seem to be real... or are they ?)

[lucy24]

wtf indeed. To make sure we've understood correctly: your logs are reporting 403, but in fact the visitors come through without trouble?

The response reported in logs is not always the response the user receives. (This is one of the top five things it took me several years to wrap my brain around.) But ordinarily that would manifest itself the other way around: logs report a 200 while the user gets a 4xx.

First and most obvious question: Pages hardly ever exist in a vacuum, unless we're talking about robots.txt. What happens with supporting files? Presumably you got them all in your Big Box visit, so your page looked the way it was supposed to-- stylesheets, pictures and so on-- or you'd have said. So do your logs report a whole string of 403s on each visit, and if so, what-if-any referer is being sent?

[kahuna]

It looks like this is actually my fault because I am running my own Perl script for error reporting.
I am now looking at my actual server logs this morning and I am not seeing the problem.
403's only appear for bots trying to access the scripts directly, which is intended.
If a person visits the page with the script in iframe, my raw server logs don't appear to generate the 403 error.

I checked my "script error" reporting a bunch after I started using the particular code in the htaccess file Feb 27th..
to see if there were any problems, and there were none. Why did they start two weeks ago.. and why for only Iphone and Ipad ? No need to dwell on that.

My apologies for this false alarm... I'll get back if the problem is in my actual server logs.
Thanks again group and Lucy.

[lucy24]

why for only Iphone and Ipad

All iOS, or only ones using the latest operating system? (I think it's 9.3) There may be some new security tweak leading to a glitch in content handling.