Help!
March 21, 2005
Could someone who’s familiar with Apache’s mod_rewrite and regexp help me understand what’s wrong with the following statements?
# Slashdot video…
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://*slashdot* [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} /files/videos/bull_512k.mov [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /files/videos/sorry_slashdot.mov [R=301,L]
I know I’m doing something wrong, but I’m not sure what…
Thank you. :)
Waitaminute… You got Slashdotted? Ouch.
No, a 1.8MB video I host is linked directly from Warren Ellis’ blog. I consider it a precursor to Slashdotting, because the video is especially funny.
Ahh, pre-emptive Slashdot denial measures. I saw the Warren Ellis thing, I imagine he found it on his /friendsfriends (![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
batwinged has him on her list.
mod_rewrite uses regular expressions
Your match condition is slightly off — “*” is not a wildcard but a “zero or more” modifier for regular expressions. Make your first line:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?slashdot.* [NC]
Note replacing * with .* (zero or more of any non-newline), and since the wildcard matcher is greedy, getting more specific before “slashdot”.
Also (you may already know this), checking the referrer doesn’t qork all that often; it’s only supplied when the person clicks a link on the originating page (cutting and pasting the URL into a browser will go to your site w/o setting the referrer.)
Re: mod_rewrite uses regular expressions
Thank you. My regexp is really bad. :\
And yeah, I knew the second part… I was just somewhat anticipating /. submissions of the movie itself, and I wouldn’t want the direct link of people clicking right on it.
Thanks for helping me straighten that out… I’ll toss it in tomorrow when I’m doing more server work.