I am running Nagios version 2.0b4 with Apache 1.3.29 on OpenBSD 3.8.

Everytime I try to go to my http://website/nagios/cgi-bin it gives error -

Error 403
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /nagios/cgi-bin/ on this server

However, http://website/nagios/ works fine!

Apache access_log shows -

nagiosadmin [26/May/2006:19:46:33 +1000] "GET /nagios/cgi-bin/this .txt HTTP/1.1" 403 293

Apache error_log shows -

[Fri May 26 19:46:33 2006] [error] [client 203.13.45.66] file permissions deny server execution: /myserver/nagios/cgi-bin/this.txt

Directory permission for "/var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin" directory looks like this -

drwxr-xr-x 2 root daemon 512 May 26 16:51 /nagios/cgi-bin/

File permissions on "/var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin" directory looks like this -

-rw-r--r-- 1 root daemon 73 May 26 16:51 .nagios_passwd
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 240064 Sep 4 2005 avail.cgi
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 241600 Sep 4 2005 cmd.cgi
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 202848 Sep 4 2005 config.cgi
-rw-r--r-- 1 root daemon 4 May 26 16:49 this.txt

Note: "this.txt" is a file I created.

Here's my nagios part of httpd.conf

ScriptAlias /nagios/cgi-bin /var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin
<Directory "/var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/">
Options ExecCGI
AllowOverride AuthConfig
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AuthName "Nagios Access"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/.nagios_passwd
Require user nagiosadmin
</Directory>


Alias /nagios /var/www/mysite/nagios
<Directory "/var/www/mysite/nagios/">
Options -Indexes
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from <my IP>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Nagios"
AuthUserFile /var/www/mysite/nagios/.nagios_passwd
Require user nagiosadmin
</Directory>

Can you execute scripts in this directory?
It won't be able to actually execute "this.txt"

you have posted so much , and lo the answer is already in the question.
A simple
chmod +755 /var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/this.txt
solves the problem

No, it can't. I have also set permission 755 to "this.txt" and it gives Internal Server Error if I go http://mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/this.txt and gives the old permission denied error if I go "http://mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/"

my /etc/nagios directory is a symlink to /var/www/etc/nagios

I did a /usr/local/sbin/nagios -v /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg & it works fine - shell exit code is 0.

Then I tried to start Nagios (/usr/local/sbin/nagios -d /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg) & it starts fine as well.

Is there any other httpd.conf directive I should look at?

That would be because it is looking for something to interpret this.txt with but can't find it; there is no #!/usr/bin/perl or a different script engine at the top. Try writing a perl script there and do
chmod +755 /var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi
That should clear up the internal server error. I don't think apache allows anybody to list the contents of /cgi-bin/ for securty reasons; my apache dosen't and there shouldn't be a need to anyway.

I have solved this problem, somewhat. What I found is if I put the
cgi-bin in "/var/www/mysite/cgi-bin/" & point apache to read it,
nagios can read it fine. It asks for password and shows everything!

As soon as I point Apache to read "/var/www/mysite/nagios/cgi-bin" it gives the permission denied error.

This is not a biggie but does anyone know what this is happening and
how can I solve it?