ghost tilde link problem

[dchad]

I have a problem with a new site I created yesterday: cuke-annex.com. This problem happens on various computers not just here at home, Mac and PC, on different browsers.
I've been working with web sites since 1998 and never had this happen. I use an old Front Page 2000 to create and work with my sites.

Relative links within this site are subject to an intermittent problem - a tilde (~) appears before a page name and I'm directed to File Not Found. Removing the tilde from the URL line doesn't work - it reappears. This happens abouty half the time in the two folders I've created.

Sometimes this comes up: http://cuke-annex.com/index.html - and that works and is correct
Sometimes this comes up: http://cuke-annex.com/~index.html - and that brings up File Not Found

Sometimes this comes up: http://cuke-annex.com/the-the-book/the-home.htm - and that works
Sometimes this comes up: http://cuke-annex.com/~the-the-book/the-home.htm - and that brings up File Not Found

Tech friends have advised me to solve the problem by giving absolute URL names (http etc) to the links. But where did this problem come from? What can be done about it?

I think I should start all over in creating the site - it's very simple. But I'm sure curious.

Thanks. David Chadwick - dchad@cuke-annex.com

[toast0]

My guess is this isn't anything you've done wrong, you probably need to contact support. (or if you're lucky one of the wonderful employees will see this message and figure it out).

If I do an HTTP Head request to your domain multiple times, I get different results:

Code: Select all

toast@bazooka:~$ curl -I http://cuke-annex.com/something_to_search_for_in_logs
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:21:24 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/4.4.9
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

toast@bazooka:~$ curl -I http://cuke-annex.com/something_to_search_for_in_logs
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:21:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/4.4.9
Location: http://cuke-annex.com/~something_to_search_for_in_logs
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

toast@bazooka:~$ curl -I http://cuke-annex.com/something_to_search_for_in_logs
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:21:27 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/4.4.9
Location: http://cuke-annex.com/~something_to_search_for_in_logs
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

toast@bazooka:~$ curl -I http://cuke-annex.com/something_to_search_for_in_logs
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:21:28 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/4.4.9
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

I'm not familiar with the sonic hosting environment, but my guess is there's a load balancer, and some portion of the servers behind the load balancer is misconfigured to redirect any page to the same page with a tilde in front. If this was something you did wrong, it should be consistently broken.

[dchad]

Thanks toast.
Yes - I love Sonic and the tech support is great but the three times I've contacted them on this they thought the problem was on my end. The third time I wrote a message rather than call, knowing it is a rare glitch, hoping they'd pass it around and someone might recognize something they've seen before. But that didn't happen. I made that site like I always do. I'm going to try two things. I'm going to use another site for this purpose (as a redirect hub for multiple redirects to save money) and I'm going to try another program to make it, a program I wanted to look into anyway.

[dchad]

I wonder if it has something to do with the name I chose for this site: cuke-annex.com. It's a value hosted site like some others I have but it's the only one that has a DNS redirect to it. That's the only thing that's different. I created this weird site called thethebook.com and it redirects to cuke-annex.com where I plan to aim other secondary projects and subjects. So the only differences in this and the other sites I've done that I can think of are the name and the DNS redirect to it.

[dchad]

Here's what I got from the email I sent sonic. I said I'd hoped it would be passed around and now I see that this is the way he's passing it around:

Here in tech support we don't really support this sort of thing, but I did take a look around and found that this seems to be a fairly common problem that has to do with how your site is coded to handle URLs. I am not a web designer personally, but it appears there are a few quick fixes that can be made in your htaccess file to resolve this issue.

I'd also recommend post about this on our forums as our senior techs do post there fairly regularly and they may be able to help you with a more specific code fix, or another user may be able to help you as well.

[kgc]

Actually, it turns out that two of our servers had stopped pulling down configuration updates - most likely a couple of weeks ago uring one of the network maintenance windows - and that because of the nature of those updates the alerts that would have told us that this was a problem we're all manually cleared.

[Guest]

So is there an ETA on when the configuration updates will be...updated? I'm having the exact same problem (weird tilde character being injected into URL) on one of my sites as well.

[kgc]

I fixed it before responding before and it would have only affected sites added in the last week.

[dchad3]

Great.
Thanks.

[Guest]

I just set my site up earlier today. I've fiddled with .htaccess, permissions, adding- and removing files, and all manner of other stuff, but to no avail. When I go to the site directly (http://www.searchinnovation.com), I get the generic "coming soon" screen, but if I try to access anything on the site (including index.html), I get the instant redirect to that page prefixed with a tilde, like "http://www.searchinnovation.com/~index.html" and the resulting generic 404 page.