Custom 404 passthrough question.

I think I've found a solution, but I wanted to see if there are other ideas on how to do it, or if this seems at all silly:

  
  when CLIENT_ACCEPTED {  
    set retries 0  
  }  
    
  when HTTP_REQUEST {  
    set request [HTTP::request]  
  }  
    
  when LB_SELECTED {  
    if { $retries >= 1 } {  
      LB::reselect pool server_404  
    }  
  }  
    
  when HTTP_RESPONSE {  
    if { [HTTP::status] == "404" or [HTTP::status] == "500" } {  
      incr retries  
      HTTP::retry $request  
    
    }  
  }  
  

I can then use apache (which is the only member in the server_404 pool) to do a pass through redirect. This is needed to allow the browser to retain the original URI and not display /error/404.html:

  
          RewriteEngine on  
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}      !^/error/404.html  
          RewriteRule     ^/.*$           /error/404.html [PT,L]  
  

Thoughts? Is there a way to eliminate the Apache rewrite altogether?