Found These In My Htaccess I Didn't Put Them There...

[JohnnyDoomo]

Do I need to be concerned about any of these lines in my .htaccess file?

 

# -FrontPage-

 

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

 

<Limit GET POST>

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from all

</Limit>

<Limit PUT DELETE>

order deny,allow

deny from all

</Limit>

AuthName domain.com

AuthUserFile /home/domain/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.pwd

AuthGroupFile /home/domain/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.grp

 

If it makes any difference, my site is a proxy service, and for the past few months my server has had regular spiked loads of 23 and higher. I found the above code in my htaccess file when trying to figure out the reason for the high load. (traffic stats don't seem to point to the load being caused by legit traffic.)

 

Thanks for any help on shedding some light on what those lines do, and if I should leave them alone, or simply remove them.

[Christian F.]

Have you used FrontPage at any point when designing your site?

In any case, I don't see anything immediately alarming in there. The last two lines could be a problem, but that depends entirely upon the contents of those two files, and whether or not you've added some user authorization via them.

 

The only thing I immediately see as unnecessary is the "deny from all" bit in the "Limit GET POST" section.

 

I suspect that the load count is caused by some other issue; maybe your code, maybe something related to the web service, or perhaps something completely unrelated. Can't say for sure, at least not without having access to the server in question. There are just too many factors.

[JohnnyDoomo]

Thank you for your info.

 

I will hunt down those last two files and see if anything relevant is in them.

 

I have never used Frontpage while developing this site, but I had used it many years ago. I'm beginning to wonder if my host put these lines in there, perhaps maybe not even knowing what exactly they would do, or forgot to remove them when they didn't resolve the problem at hand.

[Christian F.]

It's not your host who put it there, but FrontPage. If you haven't used it, then you should be safe to delete all folders/files starting with _vti, plus the last three lines of the .htaccess file.

 

You're welcome, glad I could help.

[txmedic03]

The frontpage entries may be there because the frontpage extensions are standard on the host. The Auth entries at the end should contain login information for http basic authentication.