Hi,
recently I’ve seen ugly error pages (e.g.for 404 or 403) on my Apache 2.2 server: The supplemental text blocks have been there, but instead of header, footer and spaces “[an error occured while processing this directive]” was shown.
For these accesses, the Apache error.log showed
“unable to include potential exec ‘include/top.html’ in parsed file /usr/share/apache2/error/xyz.html.var”
as well as the same with “include/spacer.html” and “include/bottom.html”.
Solution:
In my case, .html files have been configured as an executable mime type (for php). But Apache’s built-in security does not allow to include executable files (see http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32346 to change that).
Since I considered php code within .html files useless for me, did not apply the patch and erased the .html and .htm entries from the corresponding “AddType” entry in httpd.conf.
Have fun,
Usn