Forbidden access to soft link on apache web server

bnj · 05-03-2005, 04:47 AM

Hello,

I have installed an apache web-server on my PC. It works quite fine.
The homedir of the server is /srv/www/htdocs/
The main web page that I want to be accessible is in /srv/www/htdocs/main.1.0/
It is accessible via http://mypc/main.1.0/. This works very well.
I would like to set a link in the same directory on main.1.0. So I typed:

# cd /srv/www/htdocs/
# ln -si main.1.0/ link

But, if I try to access my website via http://mypc/link/, I get an error page:

----- error page -----
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /link on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.0.50 (Linux/SUSE) Server at mapc15.epfl.ch Port 80
----- end of error page -----

permissions on main.1.0 and link are:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 May 3 11:27 link -> main.1.0/
drwxr-xr-x 19 instuser users 1.4K Dec 21 08:49 main.1.0

Why why why? How can I setup such a link?

Thank you in advance for your replies.

Benjamin

hw-tph · 05-03-2005, 05:29 AM

You may have to enable the FollowSymLinks option for your document root in your configuration file. Something like this:

Code:

<Directory /srv/www/htdocs/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Note that this is an example and it would probably not work well for you if you copy it straight over to your own system. Add "FollowSymLinks" to the Options line and also "Indexes" if you don't have an index file in the target directory.

Håkan

jaws_tas · 05-03-2005, 05:36 AM

links are fine with apache, as long as the directory they link to has the right permissions AND the virtual host you are using is configured to allow following of symlinks. In other words, check the httpd.conf file contains (under the relevant virtual host sections Directory sub-section):

Code:

Options FollowSymLinks

bnj · 05-03-2005, 08:14 AM

Thank you for your help, guys.
The file that I actually had to exit was /etc/apache2/default-server.conf

Best regards.