I've seen this thread posted in here before, but I seem not to be able to find a solution in previous threads.

I have loaded some website files onto my Fedora 6 server via a floppy disk from my windows machine. The files are loaded into /var/www/html/ and into some sub directories from there. When trying to access certain files I receive a 403 Forbidden message telling me that I do not have permission to access this file on this server.

I have set -rwxr-xr-x permissions to all files in that directory and all sub directories therein. I have .swf, .php, .html, and .pdf files in there. Other files of the same format in the same directories load correctly, but a few have forbidden access. The same files are always the culprits. There are several of them giving me this problem, both in the base level directory and the sub directories.

I am running Apache. I have all sorts of index file possibilities configured in httpd.conf.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Strange thing to me is that you files reside in a subdirectory of /var - aren't they supposed to be in a apache2/htdocs directory?

I suppose the global permissions you have on /var/www/html is world readable?

I've got Apache running here but I compiled and installed it myself, and it resides in

/usr/local/apache

and its .html files are in /htdocs in the above directory. I have a plain vanilla config file for it, and it works just fine.

Any idea why your files reside in /var/www/html and not /htdocs?? I don't if this might be a factor in the problems you are having...

From everything I have seen, /var/www/html/ is the default directory in which website files should reside.

Every web tutorial I have gone over, as well as my Red Hat Linux Bible (which is rather comprehensive) tells me that this is the default directory. I don't even have a directory called "apache2" or "htdocs". Thus, I doubt that this could be a problem.

This is a stock installation.

Am I wrong? Any further ideas?

Do you have SELinux running? This sounds like a similar problem to the one here at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hlight=selinux.

That was my exact problem. Thank you very much for your help.

For anyone else who may have the problem, here was the deal:

Under some SELinux policy, any files moved from one directory to another maintain the properties of that directory from which they were moved, while those copied to a new directory inherit the properties of the new directory to which they are copied. So the thing to do is copy, not move.

In my case, moving the files made my files inaccessible to the web user. Upon copying them freshly to my directory, they were accessible.

Thanks again!