Apache2 broken out of the box?

Psixi · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 3

I installed apache2 today, only to find that out of the box, it gave me a 403 Forbidden error. It does this no matter what I put after the / in my request to the server, or what my DocumentRoot is set to. I've checked the permissions, both in the 00_default_vhost.conf file and in the filesystem itself, and I've looked into the issue of a non-existent index file. Over the past 8-9 hours or so, I've done plenty of Google searches and searches on these forums, and tried about a dozen different fixes. I've also unmerged and then emerged apache over again, to make sure everything was exactly "factory settings." My intuition is that something is seriously wrong with my system that is causing apache to fail like this. I've checked the locations of my config files, and if I put nonsense at the end of the files, apache throws an error on startup, but anything I do that doesn't cause a syntax error in the config files seems to have no effect whatsoever on Apache. I also note that if I request a folder like http://localhost/quuux, I still get a 403 error, not a 404 error, suggesting that something is wrong at a fundamental level. The only thing I've been able to do that changes the error message I get in the browser beyond the name of the folder I'm being declined permission to is that if I set DocumentRoot to "/" and request http://localhost/, the phrase "Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." is absent from the error message. A final clue is that I'm running on AMD64, and while apache was not hard or soft masked, perhaps it doesn't work too well on AMD64 yet?

Any hints or help would be appreciated.

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:21 am Post subject:

I saw a similar issue this weekend. It turned out that Apache thought its document root was /usr/htdocs, while in reality files we're under /var/www/localhost/htdocs, as they are supposed to be. Since I was in rush, I just did ln -s /var/www/localhost/htdocs /usr/htdocs for now.

This was with x86 platform and this also was a new installation of Apache. Usually emerging Apache goes ok, but this time it did not. Gotta see the bugs.gentoo.org...
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Psixi · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 3

No, that's not it.... Before I did the reinstall I did a lot of messing about with permissions and ports and directories. I changed the DocumentRoot to point to 3 different things. Just to be certain, I made the link you suggest to no effect. Thanks anyway.

Psixi · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 3

Turns out I just needed to do chmod a=+x /, in case anyone else is having this problem.