You are all getting yourself into an infinite loop here... Forget localhost - that is your server name, not the document root! The document root is the place where your web browsable files are kept. To change the document root, look for document_root in your config files. If you open the files in Vim (vi) then you can find a pattern by typing /document and it will highlight all instances of the pattern - that should help you find all instances of the document root. Next, you gotta change the server alias near the bottom of the httpdcommon.conf file. This will still point to your OLD doc root so its gotta change.

On the other hand, you could always just download webmin and install that, and do it in a nice formatted gui which, if you are struggling this much, may be the best option, or else you are going to be struggling with this for ages!

OOOPS! One more thing.... Whatever you change for the main server configuration, make sure that you change for the virtual host on port 443...Otherwise apache will just get confused!

and put?

Find all instances of dcument root in the various config files, mainly httpd2common.conf, and change it to your new directory. As I said in an earlier post, it is probably worth your while to download webmin from www.webmin.com and use that!

start over with a new file. I have a simple router set-up that changes port 80 requests to port 197X internally.. using DDNS. in the main config file i only changed the line referring to what port to listen on... and the two places where it asks you for the location of the web site itself. 3 lines... that's it.... now provided you have it set-up similarly... or with less even... it may be easier for you. it shouldn;t have to refrence outside config files for a basic set-up.... get that working first... then try to get the fancy stuff working.

As far as permissions go i CD'd into the root directory of the web site itself... in my case /archive/http

there i ran a single command, as root ... chmod -R 755 *

don't quote me on the 755... it's whatever one gives you rwxr-xr-x permissions on a ls -l

I didn;t have to change a thing other than that and configuring my router to filter the ports for me.

hope that helps... I was getting the same message you were... it's not apache giving the access denied it's the file permissions or access privelages. I did notice of you turn too much stuff on in the apache config file it will shut the whole thing down because some stuff conflicts internally.

kind of a bug, kind of not.

Tom