Bear, Diah and Pasha

406 No More

Posted on the September 2nd, 2008 under Blog by papabear

I first noticed the problem when I commented at some Comment Luv enabled blogs where sometimes my last post appeared and sometimes did not. I contacted Andy Bailey, the creator of the plugin and he pointed out that there was something wrong with my remote access that threw out the 406 – Not Acceptable errors.

He pointed me to InternetSupervision.com where using it’s Free Internet Web Server Monitoring Tool revealed that I had 406 error on all connections! However, this problem did not affect everybody trying to access this blog. Only certain people would get the 406 error and all they needed to do was to refresh or hit enter one more time and the blog will be loaded. Nevertheless, it was still very annoying and some people would just move on to another blog.

I contacted my hosting company and they were puzzled with the error. After one week, they were still unable to find any solution. The error was pointing Apache ModSecurity and naturally, the error had to be pushed to them for fixing. They told me that modsecurity blocked my script but they did not know why and they have to find out how to resolve it. Sorry for the headaches guys!

At the same time, I was hitting the search engines for days on the 406 errors and yes there were lots of recommended solutions out there advising me to append the .htaccess with some codes that will compromise the security. Reluctantly, I tried those suggestions and none of them actually worked.

This morning while having shower, it occured to me that all the errors were pointing to index.php. What if I removed the index.php from my permalinks? So, I changed the permalink structure to custom and removed the index.php from it. At the same time, while looking for anything on removing index.php, I found a thread on Digital Point forum about what must be appended into the .htaccess and this time it was not about bypassing the security.

By adding the codes below to my .htaccess, my problems are gone!

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Sometimes, the solution to a problem is really easy but most of the time it is not that obvious thus making us search for the wrong things. It is nice to see that this blog is finally connected as shown in the picture above.

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