I was testing something today for WebSphere and the server issued an HTTP 500 error. For those who don’t know, HTTP status codes are a standard collection of error codes for HTTP servers, the things that give you web pages when you type in URLs or click on hyperlinks. When you try to go to a web page and something pops up that says “404 - page not found”, that is a a standard HTTP status code. 404 is the code for “not found”, meaning that the file you attempted to reach is not there. Those of you who live in Atlanta can now sleep better at night knowing that the Internet doesn’t somehow know your area code without you providing it.

The HTTP Status Code 500 stands for “Internal Server Error”. According to specification page, this means the following: “The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.”

But check out IBM’s 500 error message:

In case you have images turned off in your browser, it says:
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, you@youraddress.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the sever error log.

Ah, so I did something that made the error happen. Right; well, if I did, and someone can actually perform an action with a web browser that can give your server an internal error that it cannot otherwise classify, then guess whose problem that is? Yours.

I have never seen an HTTP 500 status code, even in Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, that suggested that the user could have caused the problem.