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Message-ID: <e498c1660708300850x296aaf3fi153db61faaef92c@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:50:57 -0400
From: "Joshua Slive" <joshua@slive.ca>
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To: users@httpd.apache.org
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Subject: Re: [users@httpd] ErrorDocument 404 redirect with server response
 code issue

On 8/30/07, Steve Finkelstein <sf@stevefink.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to redirect users to my base URL upon a 404 submission. According
> to Apache's documentation, the method I'm using is not sufficient:
>
> Note that when you specify an ErrorDocument that points to a remote URL (ie.
> anything with a method such as http in front of it), Apache will send a
> redirect to the client to tell it where to find the document, even if the
> document ends up being on the same server. This has several implications,
> the most important being that the client will not receive the original error
> status code, but instead will receive a redirect status code.
>
> I'd send like use proper headers, send a 404 to the client, then redirect
> them to my base URL.
>
> Is this possible? Should I resort to mod_rewrite versus ErrorDocument?

No, it's not possible. This is just the way HTTP works. You either get
an error code (404) or you get a redirect code (30x), you can have
both.

As a design issue, I suggest making a proper 404 page and simply
providing an obvious link on this page back to your home page. This is
clearer both for real users and for robots.

If you really want to, you can create a 404 error page that uses a
<meta> refresh in the html to take you back to the homepage. But this
would be ugly and annoying.

Joshua.

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