HTTP Error 400: Size of a request header field exceeds server limit

April 10, 2013 - 9:30am - by admin

I have got an error generated by Apache while configuring Plexcel (PHP Active Directory module):

Error 400: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

The solution was an easy one: to increase allowed request field size in Apache configuration (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for RHEL):

LimitRequestFieldSize 16380

Just for information: the default value for LimitRequestFieldSize is equal to 8190.

If you cannot change server settings just try to clean up your browser cookies and limit the size of cookies stored in your browser. It may prevent your browser to send too big request.

 

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.PFX certificate installation on Apache

November 30, 2012 - 8:06pm - by admin

I have got a PFX made with Windows Certificate Services to be installed on Apache. So, using OpenSSL the file (source.pfx) has been converted to Apache compatible format:

openssl pkcs12 -in source.pfx -clcerts -nokeys -out dest.cer

openssl pkcs12 -in source.pfx -nocerts -nodes -out dest.key

The first command extracts public key to dest.cer, the second one extracts private key to dest.key.

The last but not the least is to update Apache configuration file:

<VirtualHost 192.168.0.1:443> 

  ...

  SSLEngine on

  SSLCertificateFile /path/to/dest.cer

  SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/dest.key

  ...

and to restart Apache :-)

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Apache Solr non-ASCII characters

November 29, 2012 - 7:11pm - by admin

This day I had a problem while indexing French and Russian content with Apache Solr: French and Russian characters where corrupted.

The solution was very simple: I added

URIEncoding="UTF-8"

attribute to the Connector tag which runs Solr in Tomcat's server.xml. Something like

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 

 connectionTimeout="20000" 

 redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

Then Tomcat has to be restarted :-)

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