MOMspider getting spurious 500 Server Errors

Prentiss Riddle riddle at is.rice.edu
Fri Aug 6 16:28:59 EDT 1999


[Pardon me for posting a not-particularly-library-related question, but
I know there are some MOMspider users on this list.]

I'm in the process of setting up MOMspider to let my users check their
links on demand (http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/MOMspider/) and
have run into an odd problem.

One particular Netscape FastTrack 2.01 server on campus is giving 500
Server Errors when MOMspider tries to visit its pages.  MOMspider can
successfully do a GET operation in order to traverse a page, but a HEAD
operation yields a 500 Server Error.

What's more, only HTML documents seem to be affected; doing a HEAD on a
GIF file, for instance, works fine.

I've tried simulating the HTTP transaction by telnetting to port 80 on
the server and my results by hand match those for MOMspider: HEAD
requests get me a 500 Server Error.

I don't have direct access to the log files, but the sysadmin of that
machine reports that the error entries look like this:

    [04/Aug/1999:11:21:45] config: for host foo.rice.edu trying to HEAD
    /bar/blah/mod6.html, handle-processed reports: no way to service
    request for /bar/blah/mod6.html

    [04/Aug/1999:11:27:03] config: for host foo.rice.edu trying to HEAD
    /bar/blah/mod1.html, handle-processed reports: no way to service
    request for /bar/blah/mod1.html

    [04/Aug/1999:11:33:41] config: for host foo.rice.edu trying to HEAD
    /bar/blah/mod1.html, handle-processed reports: no way to service
    request for /bar/blah/mod1.html

Any ideas?  Are there any known bugs in Netscape FastTrack which could
explain this problem?

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle


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