doing some googling, i found that it was some webdav exploit for windows IIS servers (or a related buffer overflow attack) that is putting these enormously long messages in my access_log files:
SEARCH /\x90\x02\xb1..... (continues for about 30,000 characters); this is supposed to be just a nuisance for apache, but i was wondering how i could avoid all these requests to my server (it makes the log files unnecessarily large)
i found this site:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=22371 which says i can add this to my httpd.conf file:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)cmd.exe(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)root.exe(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/_vti_bin\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/scripts\/\.\.(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/_mem_bin\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/msadc\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/MSADC\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/c\/winnt\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/d\/winnt\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/x90\/(.*)$
http://www.microsoft.com
</IfModule>
is this a good idea? i don't want users getting redirected away from my site just to be linked to microsoft's site...
*edit: darn, even after adding the above options to httpd.conf, i still get those SEARCH lines in my access_log; it is using up too much bandwidth...