I have a Debian server running vhosts on Apache 2.2.9. All of the web files were backed up via scp using -p to preserve times and modes. All files are identical and the vhost configs are identical as well. For some reason, though, on the new server all HTTP requests for valid files are returning 403. Tailing the logs only produces this error message:

[Sat Dec 13 13:53:55 2008] [crit] [client x.x.x.x] (13)Permission denied: /home/david/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

All of the .htaccess files and their modes were moved over. The directory structure is identical to the old server. I have been googling for over an hour now with my site still down. Any help would really be appreciated.

Tryand see if it works

bathory: Thanks for the reply.

The way my vhosts are set up is:

/home/david/www/domain1.com
/home/david/www/domain2.com
etc.

I had tried chmod 755 /home/david/www/domain1.com/index.html and reloading apache, but that didn't do anything. I'm not sure why any modes would need to be changed since they were copied with scp -p which preserves the modes. Ownership of /home/david/www/domain1.com/index.html is the same as well.

I found the cause. At one point during the server set up when the user accounts were created, I had done:

chmod 700 /home/david

Changing it to 711 fixed it. Yeesh :P