[TriLUG] mod_header

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Steve Hoffman wrote:

>Anyone got any experience with mod_header in apache?  I'm trying to
>unset a Content-Type header and then reset it myself, but it's as if
>nothing is happening.
>
>Any better suggestions? Am I doing something wrong?  
>...
>I can add headers all day long, but I can't overwrite that one.  I've
>tried single and double quotes around text/vnd.wap.wml and googled the
>whole internet...unfortunately everything I've ready says I'm doing it
>right...but it still doesn't work.
>  
>
It seems that you're probably having trouble w/ the charset, not the 
actual "content" of the Content-Type header.  Apache actually treats 
these differently, if I understand things correctly.  This is sort of 
supported by the existence of this module for Apache 2.0: 
http://webauthv3.stanford.edu/manual/mod/mod_charset_lite.html
but more specifically I seem to remember a flag in Apache which can turn 
off the sending of the character set by default.  *rummages through 
several servers*  Ah Ha!  There is a directive that you can enable to 
send the default character set for any document, "AddDefaultcharset 
on".  This is settable at most any config-file level.  More details can 
be found here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset
Setting this to Off should prevent Apache from forcibly adding that, 
against your will.  I had to chase this information down once when 
migrating a site from one server to another, where the settings were 
different.  The charset being incorrectly interpreted had allowed a 
particular user to become quite sloppy, but it didn't show up until the 
charset wasn't being set precisely correct.

Good luck and let us know if it helps!
Aaron S. Joyner