What's wrong with my htaccess ? (500 Error)

Question

I've written a small htaccess file to redirect Internet Explorer users to a specific page Here are the contents :

# MS Internet Explorer - Mozilla v4
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4(.*)MSIE
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /sorry.php [L]

# All other browsers
#RewriteRule ^index\.html$ /index.32.html [L]

Any clue why this would give a 500 Internal Server Error ? I have used mod rewrite before so i have the module loaded there...

Answer 1

Please try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down such problems:

# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On

Then tell me as a comment what it gives and I'll update my answer to help you.

Answer 2

It works for me, I changed ^Mozilla/4(.)MSIE to !^Mozilla/4(.)MSIE to test it with any other browser. Normally a HTTP 500 error when modifing your htaccess means that something is incorrect with the htaccess file. Copied from apache manual at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^Mozilla/4.*
RewriteRule ^foo\.html$         foo.NS.html          [L]

Some apache versions or installations do not like redirects without a full url: (one server I work on)

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.example.com/sorry.php [L]

Different browser selections could be written like below:

# Mozilla 4/5 Browsers 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(compatible;\ MSIE\ [3-9]\.[0-9.]+
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(Macintosh;\ .+\)\ \AppleWebKit/[1-9]\.[0-9.]+\ \(KHTML,\ like\ Gecko\)\ \Safari/[0-9]{3,8}$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(Macintosh;\ I;\ PPC\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(X11;\ U;\ Linux\ i686;\ [a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2};\ rv:[1-9]\.[0-9.]+\)\ Gecko/Debian-[1-9]\.[0-9.]+-[0-9]+\ Galeon/[2-9]\.[0-9.]+\ \(Debian\ package\ [2-9]\.[0-9.]+-[0-9]+\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(compatible;\ Konqueror/([0-9]+\.)+[0-9]+.+\ 20[0-9]{6}\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(compatible;\ Konqueror/([0-9]+\.)+[0-9]+;\ Linux\)\ \(KHTML,\ like\ Gecko\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ \(.+;\ rv:([0-9]+\.)+[0-9a-z]+\)\ Gecko/20[0-9]{6} 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[4-5]\.[0-9]+\ WebTV/([0-9]+\.)+[0-9]+\ \(compatible;\ MSIE\ [5-9]\.[0-9]+ 
# Others 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Avant\ Browser\ \(http://www\.avantbrowser\.com\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Microsoft\ Internet\ Explorer/[34]\.[0-9]{1,2} 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/(3\.01¦4\.0)\ \(compatible;\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[3-4]\.[0-9]+\ \[[a-z]{2}\](\ \(.+\))? 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4\.0\ \(PSP\ \(PlayStation\ Portable\);\ [0-9.]+\)$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Opera/[5-9]\.[0-9]+ 

Answer 3

I finally got a good reply from support Looks like, for some reason, i need to have RewriteBase / in every .htaccess that uses mod rewrite in order for that module to work correctly, idk why but that seems to fix the problem Thanks for all the great comments tho :)