NOooo... not the Forbidden message!

[McBoon]

I've installed linux and apache many times.
THis last time was the most complicated one... and i messed up somewhere in the middle probably... Or I'm just missing something. I have no clue why but I only get the "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access / on this server." message. i've tried changing the ownership of the files. the configtest option.... with no success. I have absolutely no clue what I could be missing. Any help?

I'd really prefer not to reinstall everything as it took a few days.

[Syngin]

Hmm sounds like file browsing is turned off and apache can't find the default document (ie. index.html or whatever Apache is set up to read first)?

[X_console]

Just wondering, but what about the permissions of the directories?

[McBoon]

well i'm formatting. nothing seems to work. I had it work before but now it doesn't. It doesn't even show the default files it puts in place.

Indexes was on so it should have shown the contents otherwise.
FOr the permissions: i've tried chmod 777 and even chowning it too.

[McBoon]

that did nothing.

well i did find out one thing.
hopefully this will help figure out the problem.

I installed apache with the defaults... it worked. I could see the default page and all.
What i've done though is I have a separate partition just for web stuff.
So if I install apache like the following it doesn't work. I get the forbidden message:

Good:
/usr/www/apache .... all is in here
Bad:
/usr/www/apache .... most is in here.
/www/httproot

it seems that when I use the /www partition it won't work. With the original /usr/www/apache/htdocs folder, i can chown it, chmod it and get no error... as long as i let them read it (obviously).

so what could be wrong with the /www ?

[McBoon]

I really should wait at least 1 hour before i post messages. I do believe i found the problem.

while in / the ls -al command showed that /www was drwx------
so i changed that and it worked....
the weird thing is... i don't remember changing that. If I reinstall linux and format, would it do weird things to the permissions on drives that i didn't format?