Hi,

I have been encountering with the following error while navigating through my emails via Roundcube webmail on my Ubuntu Server 12.04

403 forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

This error does not come up all the time but at random time which can be very hard for me to figure out what's causing the error. It can be very annoying too because if you keep on clicking "next" button or open an email to read while you see this error, the next thing you will get is "You don't have permission to access / on this server". Eventually, you'll get locked out if you try to do something else.

I have checked all my permission /usr/local/apache2/htdocs and they are all set with "apache:nogroup" permission.

Both .htaccess file under /usr/local/apache2/htdocs and /usr/local/apache2/roundcube are given 755 permission.

In my httpd.conf, I have the following

<Directory />
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs">
Options +Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>

I have also checked in the error_log to see if I can find some clue there in respect of 403 error but did not find anything like that in there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Are you sure there aren't any other locations that your server is using to publish files from? Any temp directories or anything like that that you may not know of. Heres what i would do:

1. Get a nice session going on your Front end connection and try to get a couple of the errors.
2. Try to find all the most recently modified files and see what the permissions are on those directories and parent directories.
3. See if you can 755 those out and try to troubleshoot from there.


Good luck, nothing fun about sporadic hard to replicate errors, but all the easy ones have already been solved