Just looking at logs of a not-so-busy site on one of our Apache servers and notice tons of these in the log:
::1 - - [15/Apr/2011:12:11:40 -0700] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 -
::1 - - [15/Apr/2011:12:11:41 -0700] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 -
::1 - - [15/Apr/2011:12:11:44 -0700] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 -
They seem to appear multiple times just below the GET requests where Apache has served a page & its related images.
::1"?
From here
It's Apache polling its child processes to verify they're responding correctly.
31-2 - 0/0/44 . 0.00 41 0 0.0 0.00 0.92 ::1 mxx1.xx.com OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0
The second field, " - ", shows that this isn't an active connection.. It's the last connection that took place for this particular thread/process. Since Apache polls its children every few minutes it's not unusual to see many of these on a system with light web traffic.
With some versions of Apache you'd see a "GET /" instead of "OPTIONS *" for these connections.
Regarding your second question: ::1 is localhost in ipv6.
Regarding your third question:
# Mark requests for the robots.txt file
SetEnvIf Request_Method "^OPTIONS$" dontlog
# Log what remains
CustomLog logs/custom.log common env=!dontlog
see also http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#accesslog
Check your servers /etc/hosts file. You probably have the entry for 'localhost' set to '::1' which is IPV6 format. Change it to '127.0.0.1' (IPV4) and this log message will go away.
i had this 'problem' and it was annoying as hell. one of two servers i have did this. a year or two later... i just discovered that on one server i has listen 443 in the httpd.conf.
so i put the 'Listen 443' directive in the ssl.conf file.
apachectl graceful
poof... annoying problem gone.
