[olug] [ot] Apache and IE

[Ryan Stille]

Mike Hostetler wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T
> <jeffh at dundeemt.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Mike Hostetler <hostetlerm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  > I have a quasi-off topic question:
>>  >
>>  >  I have a site with Apache2 as the server.  Firefox and Safari
>>  >  recognize the DirectoryIndex file but IE6 and IE7 completely ignore
>>  >  it.
>>  >
>>  >  My DirectoryIndex call looks like:
>>  >  DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm
>>  >
>>  >  but IE still ignores it.
>>  >
>>  >  anyone seen this before?  And, better yet, know how to fix it?
>>  What does apache say they are requesting and what does apache return?
>>  What do you want it to be (html,php or htm)
>>  That is strange, as I use Apache2 and DirectoryIndex .  Are you using
>>  VirtualHost?
>>     
>
> I am using a VirtualHost, but I have quite a bit of control
>
> Hey, I didn't think about checking the access_log.
>
> When I try with IE, it says:
>  [12/Mar/2008:10:14:28 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 404 82 "-" "Mozilla/4.0
> (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"
>
> My Safari-based browser says the same thing:
> [12/Mar/2008:10:16:25 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 404 103 "-" "Mozilla/5.0
> (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/522+ (KHTML, like
> Gecko, Safari/522) OmniWeb/v613.0.93354"
>
> I want to be "index.html"
>
> My .htaccess says:
> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm
>
> And I know it works, because my mod_write stuff if working.
>
> That's another thought -- if someone would give me mod_rewrite recipe
> to redirect www.example.com to www.example.com/index.html, that would
> work as well.  I just need it to work!

Sounds like a caching problem, which IE is known for.  Have you used 
Ctrl+F5, or restarted the browser, or tried it on a different machine?  
The browser does not need to request index.html, it just requests "/" 
(As you see in your logs), and then Apache takes care of using 
DirectoryIndex to hand out the right file.  There shouldn't be any 
differences between IE/FF, except IE is probably caching the old 
response, before you changed DirectoryIndex.

-Ryan