log-madness with favicon.ico
it is a well-known problem that some old Microsoft Internet Explorers look for the favicon.ico, no matter it is present or not. modern browsers look for a related link to this icon in the header of the website. the problem is, that such requests and additionally the requests for robots.txt spam the error-logs.
the solutions handgestrickt found on the web did not really satisfy us, because of the fact that we always have to place some rules for every virtual host. we wanted a directive for every virtual host. additionally we had to take care of the fact, that for some virtual hosts the files exist. so a 404 for these requests would be wrong.
our solution is based on SuSE 9.3 with Plesk 8. so for your setups you should change some lines:
#place this file in /etc/apache2/conf.d and restart
#apache. gets rid of the annoying 404 entries in the
#error_log if favicon.ico or robots.txt are not present
<DirectoryMatch /srv/www/vhosts/([^/]*)/https?docs>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(favicon\.ico|robots\.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /error/HTTP_NOT_FOUND.html.var [L]
</DirectoryMatch>bye bye log-spam! one forum post that really made us laugh out loud suggested the following:
RedirectMatch permanent .*/favicon\.ico$ http://www.microsoft.com/favicon.ico/requests/areflooding/my/error/logthis entry redirects all favicon-requests to Microsoft and spams their logs. another way of justice!
