Why are some web clients requesting a page named "cache"?

Posted by Toto on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Toto
Published on 2012-05-17T21:08:44Z Indexed on 2012/06/02 16:42 UTC
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We see errors like this in the apache error log:

[Thu May 17 14:32:35 2012] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] File does not exist:
/home/www-data/mywebsite.com/r/cache, referer: http://www.mywebsite.com/r/1010

It is strange because:

  1. There is no reference in the code/url about a folder/file "cache".
  2. The folder/file "cache" does not exist
  3. The client is randomly trying to access a "cache" folder everywhere on the website.
  4. It is always trying to access the folder/file "cache" following this pattern:

Pattern:

/level1/.../levelwhatever/filename (referer)
/level1/.../levelwhatever/cache

We run a LAMP (Debian stable: PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze9. We also use APC 3.1.3p1). We use Google Analytics and AdSense.

We do not know how to reproduce the problem.

Note: I replaced the user's IP in the code for privacy.

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