[Nottingham] strange problem with apache webserver

[James Beckett]

On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 16:45, danny wrote:
> ahh sorry for spam, but http://ah.homelinux.com/~monkey/buttons/ should be:
> 
> http://ah.homelinux.org/~monkey/buttons/
> 
> On Thursday 19 Feb 2004 4:38 pm, danny wrote:
> > hi, i dunno if im being stupid but:
> >
> > ive had an apache webserver up and running for a few weeks and havnt had
> > too many problems with it....now though i have a very strange one.
> >
> > I cant access http://ah.homelinux.com/~monkey/buttons/  (a folder in one of
> > my hostee's websites.

Given that
	http://ah.homelinux.org/~monkey/index.html
	http://ah.homelinux.org/~monkey/buttons/Churchoff.gif
are accessible, but
	http://ah.homelinux.org/~monkey/buttons/index.html
isn't, I suspect that you have Indexes turned off in your
httpd.conf file.

If indexes are turned on, then directories with no index.html file
(or various alternatives like index.htm, index.php, index.cgi)
are served as a directory listing.  If off, then access to the
directory gives a permissions error.

Try putting in a "buttons/index.html" file and see if it gets served.

If you want indexes on globally, have a look for the "Options" line
in httpd.conf. It needs to have "Indexes" in the list of options for
the behaviour you want, or "All" for a very relaxed system. A common
setting is
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
but I don't know what the default is on Mandrake.

It's quite common to keep indexes off in subdirectories used for
images and other resources, to stop them being arbitrarily browsed
(and possibly crawled by robots) - if you actually want users to be
able to browse a particular directory when by default indexes are
off, try creating a ".htaccess" file in that directory, containing

	Options +Indexes

cheers,
James
-- 
James Beckett <jmb at hackery.net>
<www.hackery.net/jmb/>