Forum OpenACS Development: M$ Office results in redirects

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I get a couple of errors on our website due to redirects:

Error: return: failed to redirect '404': exceeded recursion limit of 3

This is whenever the clients download an Office document which opens in Office 2003 as Office queries the website for its capabilities. But the query is redirected to the login page, as the download of a file is password protected.

Any idea how I can turn this off using OpenACS (as M$ Office does not adhere to the robots.txt) ?

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Malte,

What URLs or requests is MS Office making? They are probaby standard requests that we can handle. Add some logging to see what it does or capture the sessions with ethereal.

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Posted by Alfred Werner on
Might be this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q219694/

read the files it looks for under 'cause'. See if they are in the log.

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Posted by Nils Lohse on
Alfred,

i think that's a different topic...

FP2000: Saving Office HTML File to a FrontPage Web Results in a Broken Hyperlink
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B219694&x=16&y=15

The german translation was build by an automatism... 😉

Nils

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Posted by Nils Lohse on
In addition to Malte's posting:

It seems to be that M$ Office trys WebDAV in order to load and save documents directly from and to the web.

See also:
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;838028
(How documents are opened from a Web site in Office 2003)

In the case Malte describes, there exist log entries like that:

192.168.42.111 - - [19/Jul/2006:14:17:59 +0200] "OPTIONS
/dotlrn/path/example.doc?file%255fid=4711
HTTP/1.1" 404 544 "" "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider Protocol Discovery" 0.000145...

192.168.42.111 - - [19/Jul/2006:14:19:45 +0200] "OPTIONS
/dotlrn/path/ HTTP/1.1" 404 544 ""
"Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery" 0.000288...

OPTIONS is regular/legal HTTP... see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

I added the following to the robots.txt
User-agent: Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery
Disallow: /
but it does not have any effect.

Ideas and hints are appreciated.

Greetings,
Nils