Good afternoon,

This is my first post here and I want to thank you in advance for reading this and providing any advice you may have!

I have a new install and am setting up apache, mysql, and phpMyAdmin. I have changed the group for the www and all subdirectories to 'web'. I have left the permissions untouched.

Every file I take out of the phpMyAdmin archive has this same problem, so I have reduced it to one file to demonstrate.

The file is named Documentation.html, and per the instructions contained in it I have extracted the file to the document root [ /var/www/html ].

I have created a test file called test.html in the same directory which works just fine. At this point my ls -l shows:

-rw-r--r-- 1 jon23d jon23d 192655 May 12 09:31 Documentation.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon23d jon23d 59 May 23 16:01 test.html

When I try to view documentation.html through apache I am returned a 403.

When I change the permissions to be the exact same as test.html I recieve the same problem. jon23d is a member of the web group which owns /var/www & /var/www/html.

Next I copied Documentation.html to test2.html. I changed no permissions at all. Apache allows me to view this file just fine.... Help!

The problem isn't the permissions, but the file's SELinux context. You probably moved Documentation.html into the /var/www/html directory, maintaining its (incorrect) context. When you copied the file, the newly created file inherited the (correct) directory context.

You can see this with 'ls -Z' on the files in question. What you probably need to do is:

chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html/Documentation.html

Documentation on SELinux is here, assuming you are using the current FC5.

Thanks Macemoneta,

While what I read was still rather confusing - it did fix the problem. I believe that I understand now that this is a second layer of security enabled system-wide on a per-program basis. Are you aware of a way to ensure that the correct context is set automatically when I unzip a file in the future?

Thanks again!

If you create a file in a directory, it will inherit that directories context. So if you unzip a file in /var/www/html, it has the appropriate permissions for a file served by apache. For example, if you have a new version of Document.html in /home/someuser/document.zip, then:

cd /var/www/html
unzip /home/someuser/document.zip

This will create the file in the directory, and it will have the correct context. Alternatively, you can just set the context manually with chcon.

After a little experimenting I discovered that unzipping directly into the directory will only work if I first copy the file from the CD to that folder. I cannot extract directly from the disk or from another folder. Thanks again!