Error Email "File Not Found" But No Custom Error Displayed?

Ian Ryder · June 4th, 2012, 09:28 AM

Hi All,

I have a small intermittent error which is irritating me?

Both my hosted web site works fine and my local development environment works fine when browsing pages that I have designed within the site. I have set the global.asax file to notify me by email when it picks up an error and have set my config.web file to use custom error pages to notify me of any problems at the time.

That being the case, all should be fine, but when browsing "EVERY NOW AND AGAIN" both on the web and the local host I get en email saying that a page could not be found. Specifically (including others) "The file '/Web_Pages/Products/NHKDelta.aspx' does not exist.".

The annoying thing here is that I get no custom error page displayed when browsing nor do I get a "yellow page of death" for not handling an unknown issue when these emails are being sent implying that an error has occurred when it does not seem to have????

The only thing I know is that at one point I did design some of my pages under the directory "/Web_Pages/" but have since removed this directory and replaced with other locations. During this process I have changed all links and access to those pages that were within the "/Web_Pages/" directory and as mentioned above all works fine.

Knowing all that, why do I get this intermittent error by email that does not register as an error while browsing??????????

Confusing!

Thanks for any help that anyone my be able to provide.

Kind regards,

Ian Ryder.

Imar · June 4th, 2012, 09:32 AM

Hi there,

Could it be that it's not you that's generating the error, but another visitor such as a Google bot? That wouldn't explain the fact you get this erorr on your local machine though.

Also, could it be that you have some dynamic content? Maybe an AJAX callback for that page? That would hide the error in the browser, but would still generate it at the server.

Finally, can you find references to this page when you search the entire project in Visual Studio?

Imar

Ian Ryder · June 4th, 2012, 09:51 AM

Hi Imar,

I have tried the search of the entire project, with nothing found, so that one can be ruled out.

However, I have just reviewed all my errors over the past few weeks and actually the only "file not found" error from the local server seems to be from when I was developing my review structure a week or so ago, which is feasible, and all the others have come from the hosted site. In addition to this, even though I have AJAX content, the majority of the errors are coming from pages with just plain text and pictures.

Therefore, could this be Google bots?? If so, is there anything I can do about them?

Cheers,

Ian

Imar · June 4th, 2012, 10:51 AM

If it is Google or another bot, they'll stop automatically requesting the page after a while if it keeps returning a 404.

You can log the User Agent (http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/120402-1.aspx) in the e-mail to tell for sure if it's a bot or not....

Imar