Files and Subdirectories

[ugosugo]

Hello I'm a newbie here and I'm looking for some help

I've done the Basic missions and some of the Realistic ones but I'm pretty sure I didn't understand everything too well.
I remember that in one of the basic missions you had to work with the URL to go into a certain folder. Once I did that my browser showed me a full list of the subdirectories and files that were there.

I tried to use the little things I know outside HTS (not trying to hack anybody, just curiosity) so I gave a look at my high school web site and by just looking at the HTML I found that there is actually a subfolder that has something in it.

I typed "www.myschool.com/folder/" in my URL bar and nothing but a blank page showed up. Is it because of security?
I knew there was another subfolder so I tried with "www.myschool.com/folder/subfolder/" and this time this message appeared:
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

I'm just wondering why things sometime work and sometime not, so can anyone help me out?
Thanks

[mShred]

The blank page may have popped up from the way that the site handles requests. But the directory listing being blocked just means they don't want that specific directory's contents to be listed. Maybe if you tried calling specific files within that directory, you could get something to open if there aren't any session restrictions.

[WallShadow]

See, a server's directories work a lot like normal file directories on a private computer. But when a visitor wants to see a certain any certain folder, such as 'www.myschool.com/' or 'www.myschool.com/folder/' or 'www.myschool.com/folder/subfolder/' the server first looks for a few different index pages such as 'index.html' or 'index.htm' or 'index' or 'index.php' or 'default.php'. these files are executed if they are some sort of server-side scripting, or just returned if it is an html page. If the page is blank, then a blank page is returned to the user.

Look up 'www.google.com/', and then 'www.google.com/index.html', and notice that there is no difference because 'www.google.com/index.html' is what is returned to you when you enter 'www.google.com/'.

Now when the server fails to find a directory index page, that is when it looks into it's configuration file to see whether you have permission to see what is in it. If you do, it returns what ever it's configuration file says to return, whether its a hello world, or a directory listing. If you don't, you'll get an error similar to what you got.

I hope this helps.

-WallShadow <3