what is this? Not Acceptable

[Yohanne]

Hai All.

 

i got this message from the site where i am the admin. and i don't have any idea if what is this message means? any body here experience like this notification/message and can you help and assist what wrong with this?

 

Not Acceptable

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

 

 

 

Thanks

[cpd]

The server has experienced a 406 error and tried to handle it using some sort of error document but couldn't find the error document and has informed you of this.

 

406 Not Acceptable

 

The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating
response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable
according to the accept headers sent in the request.

 

- RFC2616 HTTP/1.1, pp 67. Available at: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#page-67

[Yohanne]

You mean it is all about hosting provider?

[cpd]

Not necessarily, the response served up by the server is a 406, but in the process of handling the 406 it found a 404 as the error document couldn't be found. A simple visulisation:

 

Client                  Server                 File System
           Request
   |---------------------->|                        |
   |                       | Handle Request         |
   |                       | 406                    |
   |                       |   Get error document   |
   |                       |----------------------->|
   |                       |                        |
   |                       |  Document not found    |
   |                       |<-----------------------|
   |  406 with 404 error   |                        |
   |<----------------------|                        |

That said, PHP or something else could just be setting the HTTP status code and sending the response. 

Edited June 4, 2013 by cpd

[Yohanne]

okay thanks for you great chart and so what can i do to solve this issue? is there is any issue about the code that i need to debug?

[DavidAM]

When a browser (or any other client) sends a request (such as "GET index.php"), it sends several headers. One of those indicates the type of response the client is prepared to accept:

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

The "*/*" on the end indicates "I'll take anything you can give me", but the "q=0.8" indicates a preference value (i.e. I would rather have the stuff listed in the "q=0.9").

 

 

That message would indicate to me that a request was made without the "*/*" on the end, and the output that the WEB server found to send does not match any of the "Acceptable" types.

 

Do you need to debug it? That depends on what triggered the error, and what you want it to do in that case. Is this a response you got through a standard browser request or are you reading this from the logs?