Pretty long story, but bear with me as I think most of this info is important...
I was working on creating some custom error pages and, as I understand it, it would require adding some "ErrorDocument" lines to my .htaccess file. Nothing I haven't done before, so I figure no big deal. At first, I thought about using the .shtml utility in Cpanel, but I don't think its able to do quite what I want (email webmaster). Anyway, I upload my custom error pages. I access my root via FTP using the standard lame-o Windows Explorer and find that there apparently is no .htaccess file in my root. For some reason or another, it doesn't occur to me that I have subdomains active and so, therefore, there HAS to be one somewhere. So before thinking, I create and upload my own. In order to test that this succeeded, I try to open some nonexistant page so I can get my custom 404. No luck - the standard IE 404 comes up. I made sure it was over the 512 bytes minimum, where IE automatically bypasses custom 404's and then re-FTP'd via Explorer to reopen the file to make sure all is cool there. When I reopen, I find out there is no .htaccess file anymore. So, I figure something beyond my comprehension is going on and I install SmartFTP to see if it can shed some light on the subject. I connect and find that there is not only the one .htaccess file I uploaded, but 3 others as well - all with a .[10-digit number] extension.
My questions are these: Why are there multiple .htaccess files here? What do they do? And, quite simply, how can I get my custom error documents to work?
Many thanks in advance for your assistance!
P.S. - Obviously, backups have already been made. Better safe, then sorry
oh BTW Rock Sign
