Redirecting 404 errors
In the process of setting up a new server, we're trying to keep from having
to copy over 6+ year old stale files to the new machine.
I've been given the go ahead, provided that I can redirect 404 errors to the
old machine, and then after a while, we'll just kill the old machine.
Unfortunately, I've run into a bit of a headache --
It seems that iPlanet 4.1SP7 won't let me re-write the 'Status' line in an
error handler. I know this was possible under Netscape 3.0k, (and
yesterday, after putting in a ticket with tech support, I verified that I
wasn't crazy) :
--
andrew% telnet [old_server] 80
Trying 128.164.127.251...
Connected to [old_server].
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /~oneiros/blah HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 302
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.0K
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 19:17:24 GMT
Location: http://[dummy_server]/~oneiros/blah
Content-type: text/html
Connection: close
Connection closed by foreign host.
andrew% telnet [test_server] 80
Trying 128.164.142.47...
Connected to [test_server].
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /~oneiros/blah HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 404 Not found
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/4.1
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 19:16:23 GMT
Location: http://[old_server]/~oneiros/blah
Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 5496
Connection: close
--
The two error handlers are identical, except for the machine they redirect
to.
After getting the call back from tech support, I really don't think the
person I spoke to understood what I was trying to do. [and well, I didn't
have the working example to show him].
Although I could do this using meta tags for redirection, that's not going
to work for images, and we have too many users who have used absolute URLS.
Does anyone out there know if there's some sort of work around for this
problem? (iWS 6 may be an alternative if absolutely necessary, but we're
reluctant to switch to a recently released version due to some history with
other applications).
--
Joe Hourcle
Networking and Information Technology
The George Washington University
