Apache DocumentRoot problem

I just completed my first install of Apache 2 on Fedora Core 3. I tested the server after the install and it worked. Then, in the httpd.conf file I changed DocumentRoot and Directory to "/public_html/www" and restarted the server. It apparently didn't start because when I ran apachectl status I get "ERROR at dump.c:188: Connection refused." When I change DocumentRoot and Directory back to "/var/www/html" Apache works again.

Now, let me tell you about /public_html. It is /dev/sda1 (SATA drive) and has a single partition formatted as ext3 and mounted as /public_html. /public_html and /public_html/www both have 755 as permissions.

Is this anything that someone else has run across? I googled on this for a long while and came up with nothing. I didn't see anything in the logs either, but I might not be looking in the right place. I hope I'm not missing something simple here...

When you start apache - does it really start? Assuming you've started on 80 port then what does this command tell you

lsof -i:80


What do you see when you run the command

apachectl -k start

Can you display the contents of

ls /public_html/www

Thanks for your reply linuxxed.

If I leave DocumentRoot at /var/www/html (RPM install default) and start apache with apachectl -k start, lsof -i:80 yields the following:

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME httpd 11421 root 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11422 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11423 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11424 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11425 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11426 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11427 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11428 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN) httpd 11429 apache 3u IPv6 274175 TCP *:http (LISTEN)

When I change DocumentRoot to /public_html/www, apachectl -k start and lsof -i:80 display nothing.

As for the contents of /public_html/www, they are:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 10:38 cgi-bin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 20 12:33 error drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 10:38 html drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 20 13:06 icons -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64 Feb 21 00:35 index.html drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Feb 20 12:32 manual drwxr-xr-x 2 webalizer root 4096 Feb 20 02:15 usage

I just copied this stuff from the default directory. I don't know if it is necessary.

Take a look at your apache error.log to see why it doesn't start. I guess it has something to do with mod_userdir, and if so edit your apache config file (usually httpd.conf) to change the UserDir directory to the new location.

Thanks for the suggestion bathory, but I'm not using user directories. I'm trying to modify where the documents are stored at the high level.

Now I've taken a different approach and came up with some interesting results. I left the global DocumentRoot and Directory alone. I added the following in the VirtualHost section:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.gunrdev.com
  ServerAlias gunrdev.com *.gunrdev.com
  DocumentRoot "/public_html/www"
  <Directory "/public_html/www">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  ErrorLog logs/www.gunrdev.com-error_log
  LogLevel debug
  CustomLog logs/www.gunrdev.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now apache will start, but I get the good old 403 error. However, like I've said before, the permissions for /public_html and /public_html/www are 755. The actual error message is as follows:

Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I've tried several more things now. First of all, I realized that I can't use Vhosts since I want to use SSL. So I commented all of that section out.

Next I tried to get sneaky. I changed the DocumentRoot and Directory back to /var/www/html (default). Then I created /var/www/htmllink, which is a symbolic link to /public_html/www. Then I ran apachectl startssl and renamed /var/www/html.link to /var/www/html and renamed the actual folder /var/www/html to /var/www/html.old.

Well, it was sneaky, but it didn't work.

What it seems to boil down to is that I can't change DocumentRoot to a location on a physical drive other than the one where apache is installed.

Just in case anyone runs into this problem in the future...

I submitted this as bug 33679 and got a resolution. Turns out it was SELinux that was preventing the directory change. The resolution was to

chcon -R system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t /my/new/docroot

or turn off the SELinux policy for httpd using:

setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans=1