I’m getting a few 404s and can’t figure out why.

My .htaccess looks like:

# boatload of Deny from IPs

<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /
  
  # Block most requests to mydomain.com
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/403.shtml$
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [NC,OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule .* - [R=403,L]

# more stuff

This is an area of my shared hosting account that should not be accessible to the www. I’d like any request (other than /403.shtml) to get a 403.

Yet I find this singular 404 in my Apache access log…

apache access log

I’m probably missing something obvious. I occasionally see a few other 404s (not in this particular log file), but mostly I get the expected 403s.

This isn’t a big deal. But if I am doing something wrong I’d like to find out.

Any suggestions?