You have to verify ownership of the domain to get the ball rolling. They allow you to either upload a unique html page to the domain or add a cname entry which points to google.com. I chose the former because it was simple and easy to do.

Google tells you up to 48 hours before the account is active. Well, 48 hours came and went. Then a whole week came and went and I heard nothing. Searches for why this was taking so long did not turn up much.

I finally stumbled upon some http log entries which show google was trying to verify. The entries looked like this:

216.239.36.136 – - [27/Mar/2007:22:58:25 +0000] “GET /googlehostedservice.html HTTP/1.0” 412 258 “-” “Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0.1”

Look, a clue! Notice the 412 error code.

After some more hunting, it turns out that the verification process is triggering Apache mod_security. Luckily, the fix is simple.

If you don’t already have one, create a .htaccess file in you webserver root directory. In this file put

SecFilterEngine Off

My host is textdrive and I found a textdrive specific fix here but this fix should apply to almost everybody who is getting 412 error codes in their log files.