Bill Verity wrote:

> This is probably a general web server question.  When I look at the
> "error_log" file for apache on the machine that runs "wa" (that's the
> only thing it does),  is see a number of entries like
>
> File does not exist: /etc/local/apache/htdocs/robots.txt
> File does not exist: /etc/local/apache/htdocs/favicon.ico
>
> I'm not aware of having any html that looks for these files.  Are
> they something generic or is this specific to "wa"?
>

The requests for robots.txt are probably coming from search engine spiders
that are trying to crawl your web site. This file can be used to identify
portions of your web site which are "off limits" to well-behaved crawlers.
Some crawlers ignore the directives in this file.

The requests for favicon.ico are probably coming from visitors' browsers.
Some browsers request this file every time a site is visited. If the file
exists, the image it contains will be displayed to the left of the URL in
the browser's location box. If the visitor adds the site to a favorites or
bookmarks list, the image may also be displayed with the entry in that list.

--
Paul Russell
Senior Systems Administrator
University of Notre Dame