Comments on: Curing ‘Symbolic link not allowed’ (Apache 2.0)

By: Drew

Drew — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:39:24 +0000

Habib,

What does your error logs for Apache say? Usually you can find out what the error logs are telling you and do a simple search on the error on Google, and figure it out pretty fast. Let me know if you still need some help.

By: Habib

Habib — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:39:58 +0000

Hi,
I’m having the same problem. I have my DocumentRoot directory on the local filesystem. However, I cannot follow the links! My DocumentRoot is /web and here is the permission for it:

drwxrwxrwx 3 root apache 4096 Jul 17 11:09 /web

In /web directory I have a symlink:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 16 17:00 /web/habib.html -> /home/habib/web/habib.html

Permissions for /web (DocumentRoot) and other directories:


drwxrwxrwx 3 root       root        0 Jul 17 10:33 /home
drwxrwxrwx 2 habib groupa 64 Jul 17 10:58 /home/habib
drwxrwxrwx 2 habib groupa 64 Jul 16 17:04 /home/habib/web
-rwxrwxrwx 1 nfsnobody  nfsnobody  69 Jul 16 16:57 /home/habib/web/habib.html

As you can see, I have read, write and execute permissions on all files and directories.

And here is from my httpd.conf:


User apache
Group apache

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Would you help me please?

Thanks.

By: dean

dean — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:45:16 +0000

Setting every directory to executable all the way down from the root to the directory I was linking to did the trick for me. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:23:29 +0000

qw(Add a new (larger) disk to the system, format it accordingly, migrate the old /var/ mount-point to the new partition and change the DocumentRoot in the Apache configuration. This requires backing up old files and pushing them to the new partition and reconfiguring a small part of Apache; could cause a lot of downtime.)

If you have the luxury of being able to add a seprate partion to the system it’s actually way easier than this and doesn’t require reconfiguring apache.

add the new partition to the system (however you are going to do that based on your hardware)
mount it temporarily at something like /mnt/myNewDisk or just /mnt (see man mount)
*Take a backup*
move all the files from /var/www (or whatever your web dir is.
mv /var/www/* /mnt/myNewDisk/
unmount said new disk
umount /mnt/myNewDisk
remount it on the now empty /var/www/ which makes a great mount point
edit your fstab (or vfstab) file to ensure this mounts at startup.

I’m leaving out details on things like mount and fstab because they are a little os/vendor/filesystem specific. Generally they are pretty similar but you may need to brush up on the man page. In a pinch the /etc/fstab or /etc/vfstab can give you the options that you need but you’ll have to double check your syntax for the command line.

By: Drew

Drew — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 03:33:53 +0000

Guys (and Gal),

Thanks for the feedback. Of course you can disable SELinux, or just set the correct permissions for SELinux to work nicely with Apache. Keep up the comments!

Regards,
Drew

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:53:18 +0000

Basically make it even more clear that you just need issue below
#chmod -R 755 /data
#chmod -R 755 /data/www
#chmod -R 755 /data/www/newdirectory

for you SElinux, you can run
#getsebool -aef|Grep httpd

to check the if it block it.
However, THANK YOU SO MUCH for this documentation.

By: Janet

Janet — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:00:23 +0000

THANK YOU Jose. It works fine after i did echo 0 > /selinux/enforce

By: Jose

Jose — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:34:55 +0000

I had the same situation described here with a RHEL installation. I thought I had all permissions correct, but still the same Forbidden error. I followed the comments here and did a chown to apache, but still the problem!
After some more searching we found about SELinux causing havoc like this. We turned this off issuing “echo 0 > /selinux/enforce” and all is working. I haven’t done more research to see how you can have this ON while still getting the above working, but for those out there who just need to get it going give this a try.

By: Janet

Janet — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:46:39 +0000

sorry line 551 should be
and line 556 should be

By: Janet

Janet — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:45:29 +0000

551
552 AllowOverride None
553 Options All
554 Order allow,deny
555 Allow from all
556