Hello,

I recently migrated from FreeBSD to Debian, and have noticed that Apache seems to want to default to having this option enabled, since my symlinks only seem to work when they are owned by root and the destination file is also owned by root.

I haven't played around with this a great deal to be 100% confident that this setting is my culprit, but I've always been a little confused about these Apache options (Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews +ExecCGI -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch, etc.)... It would be nice to clear this up regardless.

Specifically, if I set:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

In a virtualhost declaration (with no ServerName declaration), shouldn't this set a global default to disable this option on all sites, providing this option isn't overridden? Will sites "inherit" this setting since it is applied to a parent directory? Will virtualhosts inherit other virtualhost settings? If not, I guess this should be put in the main httpd.conf file and not the default virtualhost?

Thanks in advance for educating me!