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Toto
Asked: 2012-05-18 13:08:44 +0800 CST

Why are some web clients requesting a page named "cache"?

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We see errors like this in the apache error log:

[Thu May 17 14:32:35 2012] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] File does not exist:
/home/www-data/mywebsite.com/r/cache, referer: http://www.mywebsite.com/r/1010

It is strange because:

  1. There is no reference in the code/url about a folder/file "cache".
  2. The folder/file "cache" does not exist
  3. The client is randomly trying to access a "cache" folder everywhere on the website.
  4. It is always trying to access the folder/file "cache" following this pattern:

Pattern:

/level1/.../levelwhatever/filename (referer)
/level1/.../levelwhatever/cache

We run a LAMP (Debian stable: PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze9. We also use APC 3.1.3p1). We use Google Analytics and AdSense.

We do not know how to reproduce the problem.

Note: I replaced the user's IP in the code for privacy.

php debian apache-2.2 debian-squeeze

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It seems that Chrome browser had a bug (Issue 132059:) http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=132059

    for specific versions (19.0.1084.52-2 19.0.1084.56 not with 18.xx)

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  2. I think this may be caused by a CMS which offers caching functionality which does not work correctly. The script might want to deliver a cached page to the client, thus the error, even though the client did not directly request this page at all.

    You should check the documentation of the CMS you are using for a description of caching mechanisms. It could be a simple configuration error, e.g. the directory permissions are not set correctly so the apache/php process cannot create the cache folder/cannot write to it

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