Disk quotas & ulcers, Galore!
 

Here is my problem:

I had my server running just dandy. Then I decided to mess with user quotas.

As I had looked up on how to change the user quotas, I found several pages saying the same thing. Here is what I did:

edited /etc/fstab as follows:

/dev/hda2 / ext2 defaults 1 1

to

/dev/hda2 / ext2 defaults,userquota 1 1

it told to remount / with the following command:

mount -o remount /

All had gone well so far, and I was optimistic. Furthermore, I created a user to test out to see if it worked.

# touch /aquota.user
# chmod 600 /aquota.user
# quotacheck -vaum
# edquota -u testquota

I edited the "hard" value for the blocks to 5000, not the inodes. At this point, I tried to ftp into it, and I realized I lost my ftp access. For all users (everything was a bad login/password). HTTP was still up and running, so I left for work and would fix it after I get back. I got back, and HTTP NO LONGER WORKS.

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.

Now I'm pissed off. I edited /etc/fstab back to it's original state, and remounted it. Still doesn't work. This is where I'm at now. Help, anyone?

I need to add that in the apache error logs, there are no apparent errors. It just stopped working.

I don't see you mentioning you ran When you reboot your machine, Slackware will activate the quota system for you - you might want to check if a reboot helps discovering that you forgot stuff in the middle. Read /etc/rc.d/rc.M to see the chain of commands that activate Slackware's quota.

Now, the problems you ran into with users and processes no longer being able to access your root partition. Could they be related to changed permissions on the root directory? The command will fix broken access permissions and ownership of the root directory.