Stop Transfer by HTTP Error 206, Partial Content?

[schittli]

Good evening

We have a lot of bandwidth usage by HTTP Error 206 Partial Content and it
seems to be impossible to see who is transfering which Files.

Is it possible to stop this kind of transfer?
Our biggest file is a ~ 2.5MByte PDF File which is hopefully downloadable without partial content transfer. (?)

Thanks a lot in advance,
kind regards,
Thomas

[ZYV]

You can stop this by having Apache to deny the request if HTTP_RANGE is set and is not null by returning 501 Not Implemented or 403 Forbidden / 406 Not Acceptable. There are several methods of achieving this goal, notably see the examples in Apache Cookbook, p.161-162 (available here: http://z.askapache.com/pdf/ , not sure of the legal status of these downloads).

But you know, whenever I see a website not supporting HTTP_RANGE I dismiss it. You should think of a better way of counting dowloads (Google Analytics, mod_rewrite redirection, whatever).

[schittli]

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Hello ZYV,

thank you very much for your fast & perfect answer with solution -
it works perfect.

My Website is very small and usually has just some visitors per
week and I even don't have any objects which needs partial download.

Kind regards,
Thomas

[ZYV]

Hello, Thomas,

Glad it helped.

I just realized that one probable reason for this might be robot abuse. Currently most of the robots implement PDF indexing, so they might be trying to download your stuff in order to index it. If this is undesired you might try to fiddle with robots.txt.

Another reason might be online reading via the Acrobat plug-in. It usually only fetches pages it is about to display, so people reading your files inside the browser might generate lots of HTTP_RANGE requests.

[schittli]

… thank you! Once more...

Thank your very much for these additional informations!, I changed robots.txt
and now it works perfect and now more than 99% is "viewed traffic".

Thank you and kind regards,
Thomas

[ZYV]

Hi Thomas,

Glad it helped

@Z