mod_rewrite errors on Mac OS X Server

I was a little concerned with the web service on my new Intel Xserve running Mac OS X Server 10.5 (Leopard) when I started seeing the following log entry in my Apache error log:



I wasn't so much concerned that there was a critical error. I could see my Apache 2 based Subversion server (DAV svn) was performing just fine. My larger concern was that there was an error about mod_rewrite when I wasn't the one that turned it on in the first place. You see, I could believe it was my human error that might have caused the problem but I'd have a harder time believing it was a problem with the default install.

So, I looked at my config file: /etc/apache2/sites/0000_any_80_.conf and compared it to the default config file: /etc/apache2/sites/0000_any_80_.conf.default and found the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> containers to be exactly the same. Annoying.

Iquickly gave up trying to point the finger and lay blame and decided to take the initiative to fix the problem. I fixed it by giving mod_rewrite an actual log to write to (make it happy - if for only a moment) and then told it to not to log anything to the file (mwahahaha). The change was simple.

From this:

To this:


Problem solved it seems. Now why did I have to do this!?