.htaccess, hotlinking, no mod_rewrite

[Ernos]

First, I know this topic has been covered many times in your forum. I have used your search engine (and Google) to try and answer my question for myself before bugging you guys about it, but I can't seem to find anything that specifically tells me what I'm trying to find out, so I hope you'll be gentle with me!

My hosting company refuses to support mod_rewrite, so I've had to prevent hotlinking by using SetEnvIfNocase. Currently, this is my .htaccess file:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://mydomain.com(/¦$)" allowed=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.mydomain.com(/¦$)" allowed=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" allowed=1
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=allowed

This works great, it's very simple (I'm very much a newbie when it comes to these things) so no issues there. However, I was hoping there was some way I could not only prevent hotlinking, but actually show an alternate graphic (like an image that says "Hotlinking makes Baby Jesus cry") in its place if someone tries it. Without mod-rewrite, is this possible?

Thanks in advance for anything you can tell me.

[wilderness]

I believe this is what your looking for?
SetEnvIf directive
[httpd.apache.org...]

[Ernos]

Er. Well. Yeah, that's some documentation about setenvif...But like I said, I'm a newbie when it comes to these things, and while I'm trying to read up on this as much as possible, I'm having a hard time finding a practical solution to my question. Thank you for the link, though.

[wilderness]

Scroll down to the section heading:
SetEnvIf directive

Which provides an example of EXACTLY what you desire.

[claus]

welcome to WebmasterWorld Ernos :)

wilderness, i didn't think that you could accomplish this with SetEnvIf alone, so i'm curious:

From the example you point to: Is it this line that would provide an alternate graphic, and which graphic would it be then? - could you explain, i don't understand it?

SetEnvIf object_is_image xbm XBIT_PROCESSING=1

/claus

[Ernos]

I too would appreciate an explanation or a more detailed example...I did read the part about SetEnvIf, but the example provided on the page eluded me as far as how I should alter it to fit my own .htaccess file.

Thanks for your patience, all. :)

[wilderness]

Is it this line that would provide an alternate graphic, and which graphic would it be then? - could you explain, i don't understand it?

SetEnvIf object_is_image xbm XBIT_PROCESSING=1

I believe so claus.
I've never used this method, since my webhost has most evey module you can imagine loaded up.

Perhaps Jim or Andrea can expand on it?

[jdMorgan]

AFAIK, you can deny hotlinkers without mod_rewrite, but you can't feed 'em an alternate image, unless you want to write a script to do it.

Jim

[claus]

I've been researching this. It does not seem like you can do it with SetEnvIf alone. If you have the module "mod_mime" available, however, there is a way that does not involve "mod_rewrite". Unfortunately this workaround also implies that you have to write a small script in some language that:

a) accepts all requests for all image files,
b) evaluates if the recipient is allowed to get it, and
c) serves it if yes, or
d) serves an alternative if no

I have found a nice and simple example using php, but you can also use perl, or whatever you prefer. Send me a sticky if you would like to get the URL - i have noticed that posting an URL here at WW can have some un-intended sideeffects on servers not geared toward heavy load...

Here's the .htaccess part of the equation:

Action image-parser /path-to/parser.php
<FilesMatch "\.(jpe?g¦png¦gif)$">
 SetHandler image-parser
</FilesMatch>

The code does this:

a) declares a handler called "image-parser" and sets it to the path mentioned
b) checks for requests for ".jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif"
c) when such requests come in, they are delivered to the handler "image-parser" (ie: the php-script)

All the checking for referrals etc is then done by the "parser.php" script. This script does a,b,c,d as explained above.

/claus