Hot Linking

[Hyde the darker side]

If I enable Hot Linking from my cPanel on my Unix hosted web site it blocks
the graphic for my hit counter on the index.html page.

All other graphics both themed and actual image files, display OK.

Any thoughts?

In addition, enabling Hot Linking, appears to be interfering with some pages
that I have used the banner add manager to display a loop of graphics, also
contained within my site.

Is this likely?

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Steve Easton]

You need to add the path for the hit counter to the "allowed" url listing.

--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
95isalive
This site is best viewed............
........................with a computer

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

Thanks for coming back to me...

Why does the hit counter need an explicit "allowed" entry when the rest of
the site works? The allowed entries that already exist are:-

http://www.htds.co.uk/
http://htds.co.uk/

In any event, I've added the following path and it still doesn't work:-

http://www.htds.co.uk/public_html/_private

Any idea where I'm going wrong?

Thanks in advance
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Sorry, as a late PS to my earlier post, the activation of the Hot Linking is
definitely stopping the images being displayed on those pages using the
banner add management webbot. A code snippet appears below:-

<applet code="fprotate.class" codebase="../../" width="507" height="333">
<param name="rotatoreffect" value="none">
<param name="image1" valuetype="ref" value="../../images/office/wash1.gif">
<param name="image2" valuetype="ref" value="../../images/office/wash2.gif">
<param name="image3" valuetype="ref" value="../../images/office/wash3.gif">
<param name="image4" valuetype="ref" value="../../images/office/wash4.gif">
<param name="time" value="10">
</applet></p>

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

Your hit counter is working just fine, and so is your Banner Ad Manager.

However many users of Windows XP and/or IE6 will not be able to see it, since they do not have the
MS JVM and would have to know/want to install the Sun JVM from the Sun Java site.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Thomas

I might have confused you there. I wasn't expecting you to visit the site.
Hot Linking is currently disabled, so the hit counter and any pages using the
banner add webbot will be working.

I do happen to have the JVM installed on my machine, and I haven't noticed
any problems when viewing the site from other XP/IE6 users PC's either. The
only problem I have seen is when the site is viewed from behind a corporate
firewall. In those cases the browser cannot view any of the mpg/mpeg/wmv
type files.

I can enable Hot Linking if you require, so that you can see the effect it
has?

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

Ok.

As far as users having the MS JVM, it depends on when they purchased/installed it.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

 

[Hyde the darker side]

OK, JVM issue aside...

Any thoughts on why activating Hot Linking, blocks the graphic for my FP hit
counter and prevents the banner ad manager from rotating any images?

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Steve Easton]

Because the hot link preventor stops access to image files with the extensions you list, from
sources "outside" your domain.
The _vti_bin, which is where fpcount.exe lives, is considered an outside or "non-relative" source by
the hot link preventor. Since the path to the counter image is
src="_vti_bin/fpcount.exe/?Page=filename.html

The preventor considers it as an attempt to access the hit counter from "outside" of the web and
therefore blocks it.

All my sites run on Apache servers but I haven't enable hot link prevention on any of them.
When I get time I'll enable it on my hobby site and see what it takes to make the counter work.
Might be a couple of days though, I'm deep into a project right now.


--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
95isalive
This site is best viewed............
........................with a computer

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

The only think I can think of is that using those two component, the images are not appearing as
being requested by a page on your site, but a remote site.

Have you contacted your web host, as they may have or know of a solution, or post to a newsgroup
related to using CPanel.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

Any help much appreciated.

I've tried the following, but none of them have released the graphic for the
hit counter, and I'm guessing that the banner ad manager is also frozen.

I also tried the path you put in your post and that didn't work either.

"HotLink Protection Enabled!

Allowed Referers:
http://htds.co.uk
http://htds.co.uk/public_html/_private/index.html.cnt
http://htds.co.uk/public_html/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/
http://www.htds.co.uk
http://www.htds.co.uk/public_html/_private/index.html.cnt
http://www.htds.co.uk/public_html/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/


Protected Extensions: jpg,jpeg,gif,png,bmp"

Many thanks
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Thomas

I'll try my host. They are helpful, but don't actually support the FP
application.

I'll do a search for forums on cPanel too.

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Thomas

My host doesn't have a solution.

In addition my post at http://forums.cpanel.net has not yielded anything at
all.

So I guess we are dependant on the good offices of Steve?

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

A small update...

Thought I'd be clever and extend the "src="_vti_bin..." line with the full
address of my web site to try and make the request appear to the Hot Linking
feature as though it were originating from within my site (which truthfully,
it is).

However, whilst FP saved the extended path locally, on publication it
removed it.

Back to square one again ;-(

To recap, enabling Hot Linking prevents the following:-

Display of the graphic for my FP hit counter.
Rotation of graphic images used by the Banner Ad Manager.
Publication of my web from my local PC. (I get my custom 403 error text)

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Kathleen Anderson [MVP - FrontPage]]

Try Insert | Web Component | Advanced Controls | HTML It's supposed to
Insert HTML content to the page that will not be modified by FrontPage.


--
~ Kathleen Anderson
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage
Spider Web Woman Designs
web: http://www.spiderwebwoman.com/resources/
blog: http://msmvps.com/spiderwebwoman/category/321.aspx

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Kathleen

Yep, your right, I can insert HTML into the webbot and it wasn't overwritten
on publish, but the counter was reset to zero. Fortunately I had a rough
idea of what it had clocked up too, prior to making these changes.

Didn't solve the Hot Linking problem though. Image was still blocked.

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

Some minor success...

Created the hot linking entries I needed in my root .htaccess. Used cPanel
file manager to view it and cut n paste the additional lines to .htaccess in
my images folder. Then disabled hot linking to restore my root .htaccess.

Published the following image without an associated html page:-

http://www.htds.co.uk/images/animal/mobile.jpg

Tried to access it in my browser and got my custom 403 error page. So I'm
assuming that hot linking is working off the .htaccess in my /images/
directory. Can you confirm? I've not got access to another web site from
which to leach it.

However...

It still stops those pages that I use a banner ad manager webbot to display
rotating images with. So not fully solved.

So it appears that webbots have a real problem with hot linking.

Anyway, out of my original three issues, the only remaining one is to
overcome the banner ad manager webbot which stops the rotation of images.

Looking at my web folder on my local machine, FP has created a _fpclass
folder, but it doesn't have anything in it.

fphover.class
fphoverx.class
fprotate.class
fprotatx.class

All sit in the root of my web. Does this have any bearing on my problems?

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Looks like after further testing that Hot Linking also stops any activeX
control too.

Me thinks it's time to find another web authoring tool ;-(

Regards
Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

Did you have any joy investigating this issue on your hobby site?

Thanks in advance.

Hyde.

 

[Hyde the darker side]

Hi Steve

Just found this suggestion of yours in another thread. I've no idea why I
haven't found it before...

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.saxlessons.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.saxlessons.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://saxlessons.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://saxlessons.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1
<FilesMatch "\.(mp3)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
</FilesMatch>

I changed the referer for my own site and extended the FilesMatch statement,
but it didn't do anything for my site. No 403 error generated for standard
images. The banner ad manager still refused to rotate images, and no effect
for mp3's or any other type of media file.

Any idea why this should work for your other post and not for me?

This is very frustrating and any help would be very much appreciated.

Regards
Hyde.

Hi Steve

Did you have any joy investigating this issue on your hobby site?

Thanks in advance.

Hyde.

Because the hot link preventor stops access to image files with the extensions you list, from
sources "outside" your domain.
The _vti_bin, which is where fpcount.exe lives, is considered an outside or "non-relative" source by
the hot link preventor. Since the path to the counter image is
src="_vti_bin/fpcount.exe/?Page=filename.html

The preventor considers it as an attempt to access the hit counter from "outside" of the web and
therefore blocks it.

All my sites run on Apache servers but I haven't enable hot link prevention on any of them.
When I get time I'll enable it on my hobby site and see what it takes to make the counter work.
Might be a couple of days though, I'm deep into a project right now.


--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
95isalive
This site is best viewed............
........................with a computer