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On one of my servers which is being used for some internal development spaces and the likes, are configured with Apache, Git, Subversion among other things. The VirtualHost configuration is nothing out of the ordinary and I thought I had full control and understanding of this server's configuration and how it runs. I guess I was wrong. I recently discovered that all requests, no matter what VirtualHost I try, return the Subversion favicon when accessing <vhost>.<domain>/favicon.ico. This puzzled me - and annoyed me a bit since I was convinced that I knew all about this server's configuration.

It doesn't seem to pose any problems but I'm annoyed that there is a configuration somewhere which does something I explicitly didn't ask for. So I've been trying to track down this configuration but so far with no luck.

The server is running Gentoo Linux, so I figured I was looking for a <Location> block somewhere in my Apache configuration. I've been going through all my VirtualHost definitions, all my module configurations and my Apache configuration. I've even gone so far as to grep for all <Location> and favicon entries in all of my /etc/ files. Still no luck.

I've run out of ideas as to how I'm going to hunt down this thing so I'm hoping for some help from you guys and girls.

Thank you for your time :)

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Strange. What does an access log entry for such a favicon look like? Maybe not grep for favicon related stuff, but look for subversion-related entries? Can you show what the subversion virtualHost looks like (if such a one exists)? –  Pekka 웃 Aug 10 '12 at 7:52
Hi Pekka, you might be right but I'm a bit bewildered on what to search for specifically if not a <Location> or <Alias> entry. Again, I'm doubting it's in any of the VirtualHost definitions since it seems to be "global". We run SVN through Redmine and my configuration for that VirtualHost looks like this: pastebin.com/KZtjNnqy –  Christian A. Rasmussen Aug 10 '12 at 8:04
Hmm. What gets logged in the access log when the browser asks for the favicon? One more idea to grep: ico alone - maybe there's a file-type related instruction somewhere –  Pekka 웃 Aug 10 '12 at 8:08
Not anything which I seem looks out of the ordinary - the following is a line from the access log: [10/Aug/2012:11:02:40 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 275 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.2 Safari/537.4" –  Christian A. Rasmussen Aug 10 '12 at 9:03
Perhaps I was a bit to fast with that statement. It does seem to return a 404 for it which is a bit odd. That doesn't change the fact that I'm getting the favicon returned :/ –  Christian A. Rasmussen Aug 10 '12 at 9:04

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

Okay, I'm a bit wiser. It's a slow day at the office so I have some time to spend on this little detail :)

I now know where the favicon.ico is coming from - I think.

In my server's /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ is a favicon.ico which for some reason unknown to me is the Subversion logo. If I rename this file, all suddenly works and it correctly grabs the favicon I have placed for each VirtualHost.

That's nice but I'm still quite puzzled as to why that hosts favicon took precedence over the individual VirtualHosts favicon. I still can't seem to find any <Location> definitions in any of the VirtualHosts which could lead to this behaviour.

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