403 forbidden error only in Internet explorer

my site shows up in chrome and firefox, but not in IE

[tarr74]

Hi,
recently redone a site and now it's nice in Firefix and Chrome, but when I try to acces it with IE the browser show up this message:

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

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

What could the problem be?

[wheel]

Check your .htaccess file. There's probably something in there blocking the user agent.

It's actually good practice. If we blocked IE users from the internet completely, the world would be a safer, happier place. Good on you for starting the revolution :).

[tarr74]

Thank you wheel for your answer.
My .htacces is very simple, i've used the same rules on several sites and it always worked well.
Anyway I deleted it, with non result. Site is still forbidden to IE.

[g1smd]

You'll need to restore the .htaccess file.

It likely contains important configuration data for your site.

[tarr74]

Yeah, I Know, but i deleted it to try IE.
And even withouth the.hataccess file IE won't show the site!

[wheel]

Something, somewhere is checking for the user agent. .htaccess is one place.

The next two places that I can think of are the apache config file and your script (i.e. check the php code that generates the page).

If that doesn't do it, I would also try IE on a difference computer just to make sure there's not something else in the mix.

Oh, and watch your log files. If you're on linux you can do this:
cat -f /path/to/logfile
which will output the logfile in realtime. Then hit the site in IE and see what the logfile outputs. There may be some clues there.

[tarr74]

Thanks wheel for the logifile suggestion.
Meanwhile I tested it on 4 PCs and on two of them (in IE) the site gave the error. On the other two it worked...
:(

[phranque]

are you testing the exact same url string and if so is it a [http://www.example.com/] fully qualified url or just the [example.com] domain name or ...?

[tarr74]

yeah, no problem about that,
moreover my .htaccess file reads:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.it
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.it/$1 [R=301,L]

tu unify the urls

[phranque]

have you analyzed your server access log to determine how the requests/responses differ for the various user agents?

[tarr74]

No, i must download the logs from teh shared hosting, and they seem not to be in real time...