What is .htaccess?

The .htaccess file is a special file that Apache webservers use to configure how files will be treated in a particular directory. It is a text file that contains Apache configuration directives. A full listing of these can be found at the Apache website.

How do I set up custom error messages?

When a bad web request is made, the web server will reply with an error message. There are a number of possible error messages that can be returned, each of with has an error code associated with it. These errors include

• 400 = Bad Request. Usually a mangled communication between the browser and server.
• 401 = Authorization Required. If the user cancels a password request, this error is generated.
• 403 = Forbidden. If indexing is turned off, and/or the server can not show/access the directory.
• 404 = Page not found. The requested URL goes to a non-existant file or directory.
• 500 = Internal Server Error. Mostly likely a script error.

These are the most commonly seen error codes when browsing the World Wide Web. Instead of using the default Sonic.net error messages, you can use your own custom messages. This can be done by placing the following text in your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument CODENUMBER URL

For example, if you would like all "not found" errors to display the file located at http://login.users.sonic.net/404.html, you would use the following code:

ErrorDocument 404 http://login.users.sonic.net/404.html

401 (authentication required) errors require a relative path to function properly. For example:

ErrorDocument 401 /401.html

Full information regarding the ErrorDocument directive can be found at http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/core.htmlerrordocument

How do I stop people from direct-linking to my images?

If you find that people are "stealing" images directly from your website (e.g. linking to your content from their webpages), you can do something about it. First, you would need to identify the problem by inspecting your web logs. Information on interpreting your logs can be found in the Webalizer FAQ. If you find that some of your images are being loaded far more often than your webpages are, there may be somebody leeching bandwidth off of you. This can be prevented by placing the following code into your .htaccess file:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "sonic\.net" local_ref=1
SetEnvIf Referer "^$" local_ref=1
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=local_ref
</FilesMatch>

This will specifically deny access to any file whose name ends with ".gif" or ".jpg" if the referring URL is not from "sonic.net" or if no referrer is provided.

If you have Basic Hosting for your domain name, you will want to replace "sonic\.net/" with "yourdomain\.tld" instead (where "tld" is the top-level domain such as "com" or "net" or "br" or "jp"). Similarly, if you use filenames such as ".jpeg" or ".jpe" or alternate file formats such as ".png" you will want to add them to the "(gif|jpg)" portion (for all of the above, "(jpg|jpe|jpeg|gif|png)" would be appropriate).

Information on the "FilesMatch" directive can be found at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/core.htmlfilesmatch. An alternate method of protecting files from direct-linking can be found at http://alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/ which uses PHP.

How do I redirect traffic to a new URI?

As with other .htaccess techniques, this involves editing a plaintext file named ".htaccess" in your web directory. In this file, type the following:

Redirect [old] [full URI of new]

Where "[old]" is the relative path to the old content, and [full URI of new] is the full URI of where you would like the traffic to end up. For example, if you wanted to redirect traffic from http://login.users.sonic.net/directory1/ to http://login.users.sonic.net/directory2/, you would use the following:

Redirect directory1/ http://login.users.sonic.net/directory2/

As always, you can have multiple directives in the same .htaccess file. You should always end a .htacess file with a single empty line (hit the [return] key twice after you type the above text).

You can also forward your domain to another website, or to a name-based web host, by following the instructions for Domain Forwarding.

Why do I get a Malformed Header error message?

There could be several reasons why the server would return an error message to you. The most common are:

• You need to have one blank line at the end of your .htaccess file.
• There may be a typo or syntax error in the .htaccess file itself. Carefully inspect the content of the file.
• The .htaccess file has to be in the directory that is is going to password protect.
• The .htaccess file may not actually be in a plain-text format. Many text editors will save formatting information in addition to the text.
• When uploading the .htaccess file to the Sonic.net web servers, it is necessary to use the ASCII transmission mode. If this is not done, the file may use linefeed characters that will be interpreted as typos when the .htaccess file is read by the server.
• If you used a graphical HTML editor to make your web page, then it probably changed some of your code.

Often HTML editors will replace the < and > with &lt; and &gt; so your code is not parsed by the web browser. You need to change the &lt; and &gt; with < and > in your HTML file and save it again. If your HTML editor won't allow

For you to do this, then you will need to use a text editor like Notepad or Simpletext.

Make sure your file matches the the code above.