1 I've read comments to the effect that the documentation for Apache is mainly the code. Not trying to hijack the thread here, but this, of course, is one of the things people gripe about WRT open source. (And plenty of closed source software has the same problem.)

2

I once got behind the 8-ball with my boss because he thought the MS Access '97 Users Manual was suffcient documentation to be able to write a program to parse text input, discarding bad results in VBA -- and I failed to do so.  The episode contributed significantly to a stall in my career.

Software: the only "engineering" discipline wherein structural failure isn't just tolerated, it's expected.

As for the .htaccess I have even less idea, sorry.

3 Noticed something interesting today: I have been reading Chizumatic on and off for a week or so via Opera Mini on my WinMo smartphone. When I do, I get the "no bandwidth theft" logo instead of the banner image at the top of the page.

4 Firstly I don't quite understand how .htaccess got involved into something that affects the whole document tree and should be in httpd.conf. Secondly, why use mod_rewrite at all? I would just match against a pattern using something like DirectoryMatch and then "Deny all". And finally, the root cause seems to be something in the configuration that generates the recursion in the first place. Why not fix that instead? Just a thought. I don't have a lot of experience configuring webservers.

5

Firstly I don't quite understand how .htaccess got involved into something that affects the whole document tree and should be in httpd.conf. Secondly, why use mod_rewrite at all?

Because it's already on, in order to prevent LiveJournal and Fark users from deep-linking my graphics files.

I would just match against a pattern using something like DirectoryMatch and then "Deny all".

Good for you, but I don't know how to do that.

And finally, the root cause seems to be something in the configuration that generates the recursion in the first place. Why not fix that instead? Just a thought. I don't have a lot of experience configuring webservers.

Neither do I, and that's the problem.

Noticed something interesting today: I have been reading Chizumatic on and off for a week or so via Opera Mini on my WinMo smartphone. When I do, I get the "no bandwidth theft" logo instead of the banner image at the top of the page.

The top rotation picture is hosted on my own server, not on Pixy's. If you don't send one of a small number of explicitly permitted referers, you get the "don't steal bandwidth" image instead of the real top rotation picture.

Probably your browser, or your proxy, are lousing up the referer.

6

"The top rotation picture is hosted on my own server, not on Pixy's. If you don't send one of a small number of explicitly permitted referers, you get the "don't steal bandwidth" image instead of the real top rotation picture."

Yep, I knew that. I figured it was likely either a proxy error or something wrong with opera mini.  If you have any interest in examining your logs, I hit the site today, last monday, and a couple of other days last week, around 5AM your time.  (The only reason I mention it is if it turns out the referer is ok, I might file a bugrep with the Opera folks.)

7

Except that "REQUEST_FILENAME" isn't the right keyword to use in the first line.

I think REQUEST_URI is what you want.

Or, for a one-liner, this should do it:

RewriteRule ^/?Chizumatic/cref.shtml/ - [F,L,NC]

The "^" means to match against the start of the string (so it wouldn't match /foo/Chiz... for example), and the question-mark is because depending on whether you're using this in an .htaccess file or in the .conf file, the leading slash may be implied -- I forget, so the question-mark makes it work either way.  The "F" means "return a 'forbidden' error", and the "L" means "if this matches, then make it the last rule we process for this request."

8

"REQUEST_URI"

Did you mean "URI" or "URL"?

9 URI.

10 Your one-liner seems to work perfectly. Thank you very much for your help!

11 You're welcome!  I've been frustrated many times by that horrible Apache documentation, so I'm glad to share what I've learned to spare someone from having to spend any more time in those docs.