Hey I need some help with this. I have apache2 and of course the default is to have the web sites in /var/www. I have a second slave hard drive mounted to /webserver which is where I want the document root to be. I changed apache2.conf and also tried changing default in apache2/sites-available but whenever I try to access the site from http://localhost I get a "Forbidden you do not have permission" error. I don't know how to set the permissions. Someone said make sure user apache is part of the apache group or www group but I have no user called apache and no groups called www or apache or anything similar. I just did a default install of Ubuntu which had Apache 1.3 installed. I removed it and put 2 on but even before removing I had no users or groups like that. Anyone know what I need to do? Thanks.

The exact error message would be helpful.

The short, quick way of the west....

chown -R apache:apache /newapache/directories

chmod -R ug+r /newapache/directories

make sure DocumentRoot points to /newapache/directories

Make sure your index file is index.html unless you changed the DirectoryIndex directive.

Did you restart apache?

Don't abbreviate the error message.

K first off that doesn't work. When I do your first command it says "Chown: 'apache:apache': invalid user." There is no user called apache on my system, there never was when I installed and when I reinstalled apache it never created one. I don't know the exact error because I don't have it set back to /webserver as document root, it's just a standard Error 403: Forbidden. It says Error 403, Forbidden. You do not have permission to access index.html. Do I just need to make a user called apache or something?

Certainly this has to be a common topic I dunno why it's so hard, does anyone know the answer to this? I need to know asap Thanks.

You only have to change the DocumentRoot Dir:
DocumentRoot /your/new/dir

AND

add the following section in your config file:
<Directory "/your/new/dir">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>