Improper HTTP Status Code Returns

I’m having a problem with any query to wp-rss2.php that comes via mod-rewrite generating a 404 http status code. However, the problem is a bit more complex than that. My test file setup will probably explain better:

To show this error, I created a .htaccess in my home directory, as follows:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^foo/?$ /blog/wp-rss2.php [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^bar/?$ /test.php [QSA,L]


If you are to load in a web browser, both a http://mroth.info/foo/ and http://mroth.info/bar/ appear to load normally. However, this is not the case. If you examine the headers, you will see the following:


$ curl --head http://mroth.info/test.php
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:06:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Content-Type: text/html

$ curl --head http://mroth.info/bar/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:01:40 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Content-Type: text/html

$ curl --head http://mroth.info/blog/wp-rss2.php
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:02:43 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
ETag: "1b073357af12abd921fea77ba1d7c443"
X-Pingback: http://mroth.info/blog/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Last-Modified: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 03:49:23 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

$ curl --head http://mroth.info/foo/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 21:23:44 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
X-Pingback: http://mroth.info/blog/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8


So, in other words whereas the wp-rss2.php will load fine as itself, when called via redirect, it loads and displays fine, but returns a HTTP 404 status code, which causes many aggregators to break. The problem seems to be specific to that file, since as you can see the /bar/ redirect to a test .php file functions normally. Thus, the problem appears to be WordPress specific. This is causing large problems with aggregators for me, anyone have ideas?