On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 09:39:40AM -0400, Dan Purgert wrote: > On Oct 17, 2024, Richard Owlett wrote: > > While trying to follow a discussion involving a deeply nested debian.org > > sub-directory, I attempted to find the purpose of that sub-directory by > > following a chain of links titled "Parent Directory". > > > > That led to http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ whose first link is to > > "http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/README"; [NOTE BENE quotation marks]. > > > > [...] > > > > I pointed my browser to "http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive"; and > > got: > > > > I went back to the link triggering the "404 error" and added a trailing "/" > > to the URL. It *then* displayed properly. > > > > Is this a typo or a server problem? > > [ understand "STRANGENESS" in my Subject: line? ;] > > Both, potentially. > > The server SHOULD give you the directory with or without the trailing > slash, but it seems it's configured such that if you don't have the > trailing slash on the directory, it treats it as a file (which isn't > there). > > I wonder if apache is doing some kind of directory-level virtualization, > where it only "exists" if you have the trailing slash on the end (I > don't know enough of the internals of apache2 to say one way or the > other; but I have run into this with certain configurations of various > FTP / SFTP implementations in "commercial" products for business > communication).
Strictly speaking, https//server.domain/foo and https//server.domain/foo/ are two different URLs which may point to different resources. For directories (whatever that means) it is more or less customary to silently append the trailing slash. But see Apache's mod_dir docs [1] to get an impression of the rabbit's hole depth. But yes, in this case I'd venture the guess that the server admin unintentionally missed to configure this in the "usual" way. Cheers [1] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_dir.html -- t
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