Authorization Required! – 401

Question

We have a weird problem and we can't figure out what's causing the issue.

Randomly, some of our visitors get the following error:

Authorization Required! – 401. This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document requested.

We couldn't replicate the error, but some visitors repeatedly get this error message on a specific page (http://www.hairproducts.com/view_product.php?product=COL-SAT104&fg). Our website is written in PHP and runs on Linux. In .htaccess, visitors are supposed to be redirected to customized error pages (we tested it and it worked fine) but the visitors get a non-custom 401 error message.

We tested different locations and browsers, but haven't been able to reproduce the issue. We contacted our server admin, but they insist there isn't anything in the settings that would cause that kind of error for visitors. We checked our PHP pages and didn't find anything that might cause this error message. So now we are stuck.

Can anyone give us an idea about what might cause such a problem?

One more question: can external javascript files can cause such a problem, making a whole page show a 401 error message?

Do you have a load balancer in front of your web server? – austinian Aug 04 '15 at 23:59 — austinian, Aug 04 '15 at 23:59
Check your web server logs. – Michael Hampton Aug 08 '15 at 22:26 — Michael Hampton, Aug 08 '15 at 22:26

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 05 '15 at 20:50

A quick search on Google suggests this is host-related. It seems some additional layer of security restriction is in effect that misbehaves. I would not give up on the sysadmins and keep them bussy for a while looking for sources of potential problems.

I don't think JavaScript could do this.

Authorization Required! – 401

1 Answers1