Good Afternoon, I am attempting to complete the setup of a web server at my home for web development purposes. I am not totally new to Linux but I have little experience.

I wanted to build the server from scratch to learn as much as I could along the way, I installed and configured each part of the LAMP to my liking using various guides and tutorials on the internet.

My issue is regarding adding vsftp to the setup injunction with apache. I successfully setup apache/mysql/php. Then I installed vsftp and configured it.

I setup a new user into my new FTP user group. I set the user home directory to "/var/www/user_name/" (This is my apache virtual server document root) and I was successfully able to connect to the FTP server and transfer/create files. But when I attempted to access via HTTP "www.virtualserver-domain.com" I would receive a 403 forbidden error even though the directory existed along with an index.html file. I am assuming there is a problem with permissions since I made the FTP account the owner of the HTML root directory and chmod 755.

This is where I am stuck, let me know if I left anything out.

Thanks!

Hi,

Did you check apache logs.?. If not check the apache server logs while accessing the page, or paste them here. We will help you.

Hello!

Here is my error log after I restarted apache and refreshed my page:

[Sun Mar 13 17:53:23 2011] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sun Mar 13 17:53:26 2011] [error] [client *ip*] (13)Permission denied: access to / denied

Ok apparently the cause of this was SELinux, found a solution from overstack.com:

echo 0 > /selinux/enforce

Restarted apache, and all was well.

Disabling selinux is not really a good solution. What you need to do is enable the associated SEbool value(s) and add an the appropriate SElinux context. If you want to set this up properly, I would suggest:

It's really not that bad man, I would highly recommend learning how to do this for any configured service. That said, your solution WILL work, but you give up any benefits derived from SElinux.

Cheers

Agreed, this was a temporary solution, rebooting the machine would turn selinux back on and I would prefer it be on. I will look into man ftpd_selinux, thanks for the suggestion.