Application Notes: Apache httpd

• ApplicationNotes/ApacheNotes/CustomIndexes

Fix Dreadful Truncated File Names

As people use Apache to anonymously serve files, more and more are we plagued with truncated file names in the listing. You can usually see the file name if you mouse over the index link. Here’s the way to configure it to list variable-length file names:

<IfModule mod_autoindex.c>
    # FancyIndexing is whether you want fancy directory indexing or standard
    #
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=*

    # ...
</IfModule>

Filter Log Entries

You can use the SetEnvIf entry, along with the CustomLog directive, to filter unnecessary junk out of the logs. I used to do this in post-processing as part of the log rotation, but it’s easier to do it here. Here’s a sample:

SetEnvIf Request_URI "default\.ida" filtered-log
SetEnvIf Request_URI "root\.exe" filtered-log
SetEnvIf Request_URI "server-status" filtered-log
SetEnvIf Request_URI "cmd\.exe" filtered-log
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr x.x.x.x filtered-log      # My monitoring host, which generates a lot of misleading log entries
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr 127.0.0.1 filtered-log

LogFormat "%V %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vcommon
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/virtual_log vcommon env=!filtered-log

Empty Directory Listings in CentOS 5 / Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Upon upgrading to CentOS5 and (mostly) successfully migrating my Apache 2.0 httpd.conf to 2.2 by merging with the installed configuration file, I was most perplexed to find that all of my directory listings generated by mod_autoindex were empty–as if the directories contained no files. After further review, I discovered this entry:

IndexIgnore .??* *~ *

The last “*****” indicates that all normal files should be ignored. I removed that and files suddenly appeared again.