Home / server / Questions / 304112
In Process
Duncan Harris
Asked: 2011-08-24 04:07:44 +0800 CST

Apache web server intermittently serves 403: "Directory index forbidden by Options directive" and 304

  • 772

We have configured a web site with SSI for .html files on Apache/2.2.19 on CentOS 5.5 Linux. Works OK, but occasionally get 403 for the root page (index.html served as a directory index). No file system changes between when page works, doesn't work and then works again.

When it doesn't work it is as though Apache has decided that the index.html file does not exist so tries to serve a directory listing, but that is intentionally denied by our configuration.

Apache virtualhost specific error log contains entries like:

[Tue Aug 09 03:10:47 2011] [error] [client 66.249.72.3] Directory index forbidden by Options directive: /main/directory/

Apache general error log contains nothing.

Apache virtualhost specific access log contains entries like:

66.249.72.3 - - [09/Aug/2011:03:10:47 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 230 "-" "SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Overall distribution:

# fgrep 'GET / ' `ls -tr domain-access_log*` | cut -d ' ' -f 9 | sort | uniq -c
   1339 200
      1 206
     31 304
     29 403

Apache config looks lke:

<VirtualHost ip.address:80>
  ServerName domain.here

  DocumentRoot /main/directory
  ErrorLog logs/domain-error_log
  CustomLog logs/domain-access_log combined
  DirectoryIndex index.html

  AliasMatch ^/(robots\.txt|sitemap.*\.xml(?:\.gz)?)$ /other/directory/$1

  CacheEnable disk /
  CacheDisable /sitemap.xml.gz
  CacheDisable /robots.txt
  CacheIgnoreHeaders Set-Cookie
  CacheIgnoreNoLastMod On

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript

  <Directory /main/directory>
    Options Includes
    AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>

  <Directory /other/directory>
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
linux centos apache-2.2 cache server-side-includes

2 Answers

  1. Since this is a virtual site we also have to take into account the settings at the httpd.conf level... Do you have Options Multiviews set anywhere? SSI plus language negotiation can lead to it attempting to serve alternate versions of your index.html that don't exist. And then the same thing can lead to it failing to find the ErrorDocument that it wants and giving you even stranger results.

    Are there lower-level rewrites taking place?

    old The log line you included is a cell phone browser. Do you have other Apache handling that deals with mobile web browsers? Are you doing any Rewrites that match on HTTP_USER_AGENT and send the request elsewhere?

    • 4

  2. It looks like you probably just need to add the "Indexes" option in your directory declarations specifically /main/directory.

    • 0