Changing error messages

[Thomas Dowling]

>The errormessages are usually "hardwired" into the server software,
>especially in the case of the  most widely spread CERN and NCSA servers.
>So you would have to recompile the whole thang....

Please folks, if you're not familiar with a piece of software, don't make  
such authoritative pronouncements on either its features or limitations.  


As has already been posted at least twice, error messages are not hardwired  
into NCSA httpd (and I'll be surprised to learn that they are in CERN  
httpd).  With NCSA httpd, you only have to edit a couple of lines in the  
srm.conf file, make a nicely worded HTML file in the appropriate place, and  
restart httpd; if you prefer, you can point to a CGI script instead.  It  
takes about three minutes of looking at the configuration files and  
documentation to find this out.

I admit that I hadn't considered doing this before, but on reflection, I  
don't see why anyone wouldn't do this, at least for the cryptic 403  
(forbidden) and 404 (not found) errors.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK