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Redirecting Your Reader to Special HTML Pages when an error occurs. Rather than showing a simple text message when an error occurs, displaying a friendly message along with a link to follow back to a real page is a nice touch. I suggest that you keep the message brief and polite. Do not consider every user caused error some type of intrusion attempt. Anyone poking around with any knowledge of how a server works will realize that you are properly handling and possibly monitoring such activity. To redirect a reader to a special web page when they encounter an error, you can either modify the srm.conf file if you have the ability to do so, or to modify your .htaccess file. In the srm.conf file you will find a line that looks like this: #ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html To specify a special web page, simply remove the # mark and create a document called missing.html in your main HTML directory. ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html You can name the files whatever you wish, and you might consider placing all of them in a special directory. I have never tried running the server configured for URL redirect without first creating the error documents. Who knows what would happen if the missing file was itself- missing! If you do not have access to the master system files, you can add the line as shown above to your .htaccess file. In order for this to work, the system administrator must make certain that the AllowOveride option called FileInfo is set. You should try to obtain AllowOveride All on your directories. You can of course have a special file for each error code: ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badreq.html ErrorDocument 401 /errors/noauth.html ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.html ErrorDocument 404 /errors/missing.html ErrorDocument 500 /errors/conferr.html You can also redirect people off of your site using an external URL. ErrorDocument 403 http://www.fbi.gov/ It's up to you if you want to send people accessing forbidden URLs to the FBI!

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