Internal Server Error on my web page

If you are seeing an error message that looks like this when trying to display your web page:

   Internal Server Error
   
   The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and
   was unable to complete your request.
   
   Please contact the server administrator, network@mit.edu 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 server
   error log.

and other web pages on web.mit.edu appear to be displaying normally, then the first thing to check is if you have a file called ".htaccess" in the directory you're trying to read. If this file contains instructions which the web server doesn't know how to parse, then it will generate that error message, and the simplest way to fix the problem is to remove the file.