I have eight Virtual Hosts running on my server, none of which I had any problems with. I recently attempted to add a new Virtual Host and ran into problems. I looked at the error_log which reads:

Directory Index forbidden by rule: /var/www/html/somedir/

I went back and checked all of the permissions, /var/www/html/somedir is set to 755 and all files within the folder are 644. The owner and group are the same as all the other virtual hosts that work fine.

In a last ditch effort to fix the problem before posting this, I ran chmod 777 -R /var/www/html/somedir and then restarted apache, with no avail.

Any Suggestions?

I'd say it's rather a problem with the setup of DirectoryIndex in your conf file for the virtual. Check that setting, be sure you've set that up correctly again.

Which version of Apache is this anyway, and what distro?

Welcome to LQ

Cool

"DirectoryIndex" is for naming files you want to serve as you index files. e.g. index.html, index.htm

I think your looking for:
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes

EG.
<Directory "/home/someuser/browsable">
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Thanks,

It was an issue with the DirectoryIndex. The person I was setting up the virtual host for has a habit of captializing the first character of filenames. I had the DirectoryIndex set to index.html the file name was Index.html.

Usually is just one character. Glad you found it.