Resolving HTTP 404 errors for Siebel on Linux

I couple of weeks ago I was checking OHS logs files that serves a Siebel web application instance for some errors regarding the application and what I found were a lot of errors regarding "File Not Found" (HTTP 404) errors.
Double checking those messages, all them seem to be happening because of two different "categories":

• transparent GIF images used in the Siebel vanilla application
• favicon.ico

In the first case, I had to look for those GIFs in the Siebel default folder for web content. The files were there. Looking further, I found a bug regarding Cascading Style Sheet: those CSS files, while used under Microsoft Windows OS didn't bother to use the correct case for file names or file extensions. For those GIFs, that meant the file extension was written as ".GIF" meanwhile it should be lowercase (at least the image files had that in lowercase).

File extensions don't make much sense for Linux, but the OS is case sensitive regarding file names. That's why OHS wasn't able to find them.

A fix to this issue is simple: change the CSS or the GIF file names. I preferred the former since using Sed for that is pretty straightforward. Assuming that the Siebel Server is installed in the directory defined for the $HOME environment variable, that's what I did:

tmp_file=$(mktemp);sed -e 's/\.GIF/.gif/g' $HOME/81/siebsrvr/webmaster/files/esn/main.css > "${tmp_file}";cat "${tmp_file}" > $HOME/81/siebsrvr/webmaster/files/esn/main.css; rm -v "${tmp_file}"

tmp_file=$(mktemp);sed -e 's/\.GIF/.gif/g' $HOME/81/sweapp/public/esn/files/main.css > "${tmp_file}";cat "${tmp_file}" > $HOME/81/sweapp/public/esn/files/main.css; rm -v "${tmp_file}"

That took care of fixing in place those CSS in webmaster and sweapp directories (yes, you should make that on both since they are synchronized by the Siebel application). This bug seems to be present only in Siebel versions 8.1.1.7 or lower.

The second issue is easy to fix as well. You only need to find the proper favicon.ico file to use (most probably the one used by the company in their institutional web site). Just copy the file to the root folder of OHS and the next time a modern browser hit the page, it will find the icon just fine.

Conclusion

I really don't know if the end user will ever notice that those images are now available... if they did, we should know about errors long before looking at OHS log files.

The main reason is to avoid thousands of HTTP 404 errors being logged. It doesn't hurt anyway to check OHS logs anyway from time to time to see how things are going.