My site seems to be running smoothly for the most part, but on checking the logs, I see two clients which began pulling down images from the wrong place. Instead of getting images from /images they are getting called from /taxonomy/term/images/ if the user went to a page listing posts for a particular category.

Here's the pertinent part of the log file.

66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 15424
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /misc/drupal.css HTTP/1.1" 200 8435
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /images/wotfAward2a.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 7276
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /modules/event/event.css HTTP/1.1" 200 2227
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/logo.png HTTP/1.1" 200 103
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /images/wotfBook.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 16325
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/style.css HTTP/1.1" 200 13514
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/header-a.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 440
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/logo-hover.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 2712
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/logo-background.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 950
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/logo-active.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 2466
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/header-b.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 5770
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:55 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/forum-container.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 10722
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:59 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/header-c.png HTTP/1.1" 200 195
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:35:59 -0600] "GET /misc/menu-leaf.png HTTP/1.1" 200 108
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:00 -0600] "GET /misc/menu-collapsed.png HTTP/1.1" 200 108
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:01 -0600] "GET /themes/bkatz/icon-block.png HTTP/1.1" 200 310

This client access my site for first time. Everything looks good so far, but then a category link is used and we get ...

66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:13 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/22 HTTP/1.1" 200 13060
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:14 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/images/wotfBook.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:15 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/themes/bkatz/style.css HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:15 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/images/wotfAward2a.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:15 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/modules/event/event.css HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:15 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/misc/xml.png HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:15 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/misc/drupal.css HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:16 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/images/happy_koi.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:16 -0600] "GET /misc/xml.png HTTP/1.1" 200 396
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:16 -0600] "GET /images/happy_koi.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 30819
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:16 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/images/nithanya1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:16 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/themes/bkatz/logo.png HTTP/1.1" 404 7960
66.82.9.58 - - [30/Dec/2004:09:36:17 -0600] "GET /taxonomy/term/images/dad_pierre.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 7960

The sidebar pics now seem to have "/taxonomy/term/" pre-pended to the URLs and we get a 404 error. This happens rarely but it did happen, so I'm trying to figure out what caused it. Any ideas?

Comments

ezheidtmann’s picture

All pages produced by drupal have a tag like this in the head:

<base href="http://drupal.org/" />

The behavior you're seeing seems to indicate that the client is ignoring this tag. It's a symptom of a broken client. Your logs don't show the user-agent, so we can't tell which client this is.

Steven’s picture

To further clarify the above comment, the <base> tag is needed for clean URLs to work. Otherwise the client will think the fake directories are real ones. Obviously someone is using a client which does not respect this tag (even though it has existed for ages!) or more likely it could be a broken spider and/or website copying tool. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

DocSavage’s picture

Thanks for your help. I'll look at my apache config to start logging user-agent. Hopefully that kind of error won't happen too much.