I Have this Weird Thing Happening
 

I participate on several online forums (forae?) in addition to The Cellar.

I have never had any problems accessing these various systems or seeing graphics or whatnot displayed.

Until now.

A friend of mine has started a phpBB forum. All of the text stuff displays fine for me, but none of the graphics do ... that includes buttons and smileys, but ONLY stuff that is hosted out of her own server ... for example, if I link to pics that I'm hosting remotely, those display okay ... everything else I get either a "broken link" notification or the phpBB default, i.e., text describing the missing item.

She is also operating her personal website off the same server space ... same problem text displays fine, graphics show only as broken links.

This is ONLY a problem from my home computer. It's fine when I access it from work. I have tried both Netscape and Internet Explorer browers. My security settings are "medium" for the most part. I have specifically allowed cookies and popups from this site, in case that's the problem. Someone had suggested that it might be a firewall issue, but since I don't have this problem with any other website, I'm doubting that.

This is more annoying than problematic, but I didn't know if anyone had run into this before and had a quick fix. I also know that several of the folks here have experience with the phpBB interface.

Load a page and do a "view source" and find an image link. We used to have a lot of people "hard code" their image links and, for one reason or another, that wouldn't work. Image links should not include the name of the server in them if they are local to the server hosting the page and should only include the directory. I'm not sure why, but this would sometimes cause an issue for people behind proxy firewalls. Try pulling an image link out of the source and loading it by itself and see what happens.

This sounds sort of like a problem my wife had with a particular web site. It turned out the site manager had links to image files of the form "file:///g|whatever/whatever/whatever.gif" and Mozilla choked on it, while IE figured out that they really ought to be relative links & loaded the images. Apparently FrontPage is good at doing this kind of thing on behalf of the clueless.... though a combination of FrontPage and phpBB seems too scary to contemplate!

Okay, so when I get the link location of one of the missing graphics and paste it directly into the browser, this is what I get:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /forum/templates/subSilver/images/folder_big.gif on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.nileshaman.com Port 80


(it doesn't really print in crimson. I just did that for emphasis here.)


I would suspect that the read access permission are set incorrectly on her end, but how do I have her do something about it?

That's very strange -- I'm able to access that graphic just fine. There is something much more sinister afoot, here.

It wouldn't hurt to see the apache log entry of your access and the failure. We know your browser is not getting the graphic, it'd be interesting to see what the server side is saying.

It's referer-protected. You probably have some piece of software which is blocking the Referer: header.

Good call, Russotto. How'd you diagnose that?

Okay, so how do I get around that?

I'm using Norton's Internet Security Package.

I don't know. A peek at the manual reveals nothing about blocking the Referer header.

Christ just get rid of that norton crap, it massively slows down your system and is generally a liability, if you're looking for windows security, Zonealarm is a good bet, or Blackice if you like being told you are being cracked and not being able to do anything about it.

Look up AVG Anti-Virus, it's the best...


...and free.

It is good, but it doesn't act as a firewall.

I'm a fan of having the firewall functionality in a separate box myself.

You can enable referrer information to a website by setting up a rule in Norton Internet Security/Norton Personal Firewall - Info.

Thanks, but it didn't work. :(

Tried again, chose several different settings, changed the way the site was identified ...

It worked.

Thank you one and all! (especially Cain).