Hm, I put this in the newbie forum since it should be an easy answer, even though I've been using Linux/Unix for over a decade. I just have never seen this before...

I'm getting a "403 forbidden" error from Apache, and I'm trying to narrow the problem down since everything looks correct. Anyway, the listing for public_html looks like this:
drwxr-xr-x. 2 username users 4096 Jun 28 22:08 public_html

and inside public_html looks like this:
-rw-r--r--. 1 username man 76 Jun 28 22:08 index.html

So my question is: What the hell is that DOT following the rwx columns? I've never seen it before, and can't find any documentation describing it. Also, could this be part of the problem? This is RHEL 6.1, btw.

Perhaps something *new*? I have CentOS 5.5 and don't have anything other than 'traditional' permissions listed.

From http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-devel-lis.../msg01329.html - Although that's over 2 years old and on fedora.

' ' (blank) no SELinux coverage
'.' (dot) ordinary SELinux context only
'+' (plus) SELinux ACLs or other things beyond ordinary context

I'd have to do some more research, but this is a starting point, I guess.

Hi there,

Error 403 mean clear deny by the web server. It means web server do not even want to negotiate.

As far as . is concerned I don't think so that is part of the problem as I can see that . in each and every file and directory when I do ll or ls -l in any directory.

Try the following:

As I can see that index.html is owned by someother user. Can you try chown root.root index.html and then restart httpd service. Once done try to access via browser.

EDIT: Just checked on my test environment. Dot (.) was not there in previous version of RHEL I just checked it on RHEL5. However, it is there on each and every file on RHEL6

Can you show the output of a tail /var/log/httpd/error_log? That would help diagnose the issue ...

Well, I did it again - I'm getting into a bad habit of answering my own questions immediately after posting them. After 1 week of troubleshooting, I was sure that I had SELinux disabled, but of course I didn't. That was the problem. Thanks for the reply though, sandwormusmc and opnsrc!