I have a couple websites I limit access to with apache .htaccess files. I also use Google Chrome on my iPhone, and for some reason, it was being blocked even though I specifically allow my internal subnet. Looking at the logs, I saw the request was coming from IP 66.249.84.145, or google-proxy-66-249-84-145.google.com. Ah! There’s a Data Saver feature in Chrome on iOS (guessing it’s there for Chrome on Android too). The iOS Chrome uses a Google proxy to download the webpage, do some compression/minification/etc, and then send it to the phone. They call this “Data Compression Proxy“. According to the App, it saves me about 20% of my data (which, I don’t care about when on Wifi, but on cell, it’s not a bad idea).
Notes…
Working on my site a bit today, I noticed that my recent install of “Broken Link Checker” was not functional. Turns out that it was throwing a ton of errors about the DB tables not existing. And indeed, they didn’t. I do a bit of digging, and find that at some point, probably for security sake, I had removed the “Grant” and “Drop” privileges from my WP site user. Once I added those, then reinstalled the plugin, it created the tables, and worked fine.
Second, I couldn’t modify my sidebar widgets. After some messing around, I found that it was due to my modifying my .htaccess file with some content from perishablepress.com. After removing chunks, then adding them back, I found it had to do with this line:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(request|insert|union|declare|drop).* [NC]
Which was blocking the ajax functionality of the page. =/ I’m sure I could modify it a bit to allow these query strings from certain subnets, but it was just easier to remove it. *shrugs*
I’ll probably re-enable that line when I don’t need to modify the sidebar anymore… but for now, it works.
That’s all. Think I’m going to go out and see about replacing the HID bulbs on my 07 Prius.
.htaccess password annoyance…
So, this is mainly a note to myself, but…
Been having some issues password protecting a folder on the work server, and finally figured out the issue.
Had a valid .htaccess file in the folder, and an .htpassword that was accessible. Yet I kept getting 404 errors. Thanks to the popularity of wordpress (even though we don’t use it at work), I found the answer.
Apparently, apache needs to be able to find a 401 error file in order to trigger a login prompt. So, adding ErrorDocument 401 401.html
then creating a 401.html in the protected folder, with anything at all in it, suddenly made it work.
Gar…