Extraordin-Air Team Final Project Statement of Problem: Configure the APACHE Web server to use custom error messages and make some creative error pages. Investigative Process: I worked on Problem 26 first, and the same essential tools and concepts seem to be applied here. The .htaccess files (already enabled for #26) can also be used to call up alternate html pages when the browser returns certain error codes.  Meryll has a nice table showing the various types of browser errors and the codes they return on the "bells and whistles" section of her website www.alwanza.com/bells/statusCodes.html. I have modified the /var/www/html/secure/.htaccess file I created for #26 so that it includes the following line: ErrorDocument    403    /custom403.html where custom403.html includes the code for my custom error message for errors of type 403, which happens to be "permission denied" errors.  Right now, it's not working.  It turns out I should have been using error code 401!  Now it works. Some of my problems above stemmed primarily from a confusion about where the custom error html files need to be located.  I put them within the secure directory because, went my thinking, it is while trying to access the secure directory that permission denied errors would be generated. For some time I had files in both areas and wasn't clear which ones were being activated. I changed the text messages displayed in the error message so that they displayed the directory they were stored in, and in this way figured out that all error messages should be in /var/www/html, and the .htaccess file pointing to the html pages should be in this directory as well. Recipe: Configure /etc/httpd/conf/access.conf to so that the AllowOverride variable is "All" instead of "None". The web resources recommended "AuthConfig", but I couldn't get this to work. The only problem I had was that I needed to set the AllowOverride variable to "All" instead of "AuthConfig" (see the notes for problem 26 also). In the primary http directory (in our case /var/www/html) where the root page index.html document resides, create a file named .htaccess In this file you will place the error codes you want to provide custom messages for and the name of the .html file you want to display when the http service returns that particular error. Here is a copy of the file on air.nesser.com for the team web page: ErrorDocument    404    /custom404.html ErrorDocument    401    /custom401.html ErrorDocument    403    /custom403.html ErrorDocument    500    /custom500.html The first field tells the http service that you are providing an error document as opposed to a user access control list or something else that might be found in a .htaccess file. The next field is the error code returned by the server and the last field is the .html file you want displayed.  In my case, these files are in the same directory.  I'm not positive they need to be, but I did have problems when I had them elsewhere.  All this assumes that you've already created the .html files listed.  If you haven't you'll need to!