Error 412: Precondition Failed · Wednesday May 9, 2007
If you host your site with TextDrive and you’re getting a lot of “Error 412: Precondition Failed” errors, it’s most likely the result of something triggering a rule in mod_security.
TextDrive uses Apache’s mod_security (the Open Source Web Application Firewall) to block comment and referrer SPAM, but sometimes it gets triggered by mistake.
To fix the problem, you’ll want to follow the steps outlined in this knowledge base article to disable mod_security — which TextDrive has enabled by default.
However, even after following the instructions I was still having the same problem. It was only after I created an .htaccess file in both the “cgi-bin” and “public_html” folders that the problem was solved.
The reason you need two .htaccess files (one in each directory) is that Apache sees the “cgi-bin” and “public_html” separately and parses them individually.
— Ryan J. Bonnell
