Apache 13 permission denied in user's home dir

Question

My friend's website was working fine until he moved the document root from /var/www/xxx to /home/user/xxx.

Apache gives 13 permission denied error messages when we try to access the site via a web browser.

The site is configured as a virtual directory. All the Apache configurations were unchanged (except for the directory change).

We tried to chmod 777 /home/user/xxx, chown apache /home/user/xxx. But they didn't work.

Is there some kind of security feature set on the user's home directories? The server OS is CentOS (Godaddy VPS).

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Not sure if you've fixed it but in your httpd.conf

Check to see your User/Group settings. Usually it will be set to

User www Group www

If so change it to your name/group

User Greg group staff

Answer 2

im using CentOS 5.5 and for me it was SElinux messing with it, i forgot to check that out. you can temporary disable it by doing as root

echo 0 > /selinux/enforce

hope it help someone

Answer 3

selinux is cause for that problem.....

TException: Error: TSocket: Could not connect to localhost:9160 (Permission denied [13]) To resolve it, you need to change an SELinux boolean value (which will automatically persist across reboots). You may also want to restart httpd to reset the proxy worker, although this isn't strictly required.

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

or

(13) Permission Denied

Error 13 indicates a filesystem permissions problem. That is, Apache was denied access to a file or directory due to incorrect permissions. It does not, in general, imply a problem in the Apache configuration files.

In order to serve files, Apache must have the proper permission granted by the operating system to access those files. In particular, the User or Group specified in httpd.conf must be able to read all files that will be served and search the directory containing those files, along with all parent directories up to the root of the filesystem.

Typical permissions on a unix-like system for resources not owned by the User or Group specified in httpd.conf would be 644 -rw-r--r-- for ordinary files and 755 drwxr-x-r-x for directories or CGI scripts. You may also need to check extended permissions (such as SELinux permissions) on operating systems that support them.

An Example

Lets say that you received the Permission Denied error when accessing the file /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/foo/bar.html on a unix-like system.

First check the existing permissions on the file:

cd /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/foo ls -l bar.htm

Fix them if necessary:

chmod 644 bar.html

Then do the same for the directory and each parent directory (/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/foo, /usr/local/apache2/htdocs, /usr/local/apache2, /usr/local, /usr):

ls -la chmod +x . cd ..

repeat up to the root

On some systems, the utility namei can be used to help find permissions problems by listing the permissions along each component of the path:

namei -m /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/foo/bar.html

If all the standard permissions are correct and you still get a Permission Denied error, you should check for extended-permissions. For example you can use the command setenforce 0 to turn off SELinux and check to see if the problem goes away. If so, ls -alZ can be used to view SELinux permission and chcon to fix them.

In rare cases, this can be caused by other issues, such as a file permissions problem elsewhere in your apache2.conf file. For example, a WSGIScriptAlias directive not mapping to an actual file. The error message may not be accurate about which file was unreadable.

DO NOT set files or directories to mode 777, even "just to test", even if "it's just a test server". The purpose of a test server is to get things right in a safe environment, not to get away with doing it wrong. All it will tell you is if the problem is with files that actually exist.