How to prevent wpad.dat entries in log file

Question

My Nginx access.log is FULL with lines about /wpad.dat (on a completely empty site with only "index.php") :

• 190.199.220.124 - - [13/Aug/2013:22:37:04 +0000] "GET /wpad.dat HTTP/1.1" 200 731 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.95 Safari/537.36"

and on another empty site:

• 190.199.220.124 - - [14/Aug/2013:00:22:42 +0000] "GET /wpad.dat HTTP/1.1" 404 168 "-" "WinHttp-Autoproxy-Service/5.1"
• 190.199.220.124 - - [14/Aug/2013:00:22:46 +0000] "GET /wpad.dat HTTP/1.1" 404 168 "-" "Kaspersky Proxy-Server detection agent"

Can I prevent the above / does it point to some misconfiguration? It seems only 2 of my sites hosted on this amazon image show these entries in the log files.

Answer 1

Your first log snippet suggests that the file may actually exist, since nginx response is 200, with 731 bytes of payload data, so, don't be too fast to have it blocked.

However, if you want to have such requests omitted from logs, you can use the following in all servers affected:

location = /wpad.dat {
    access_log  off;
    log_not_found   off;
}

Or, better yet, if you know for sure that you don't have such file, and want to return 404 right away, still omitting all such requests from the logs, use:

location = /wpad.dat {
    access_log  off;
    return  404;
}