[tlug] Can't Change ownership of symlink

["Dave Gutteridge" <ebisudave@example.com>]

TLUG,

I hope this message gets through. I've been having a little trouble accessing the mailing list recently. If another message comes through with roughly the same issues, then that's me from a different email address.

Anyway... here's the issue.

I know that it's the trademark claim of the newbie to say "I didn't change anything, and now it doesn't work!", and the suspicion is that they must of changed something without realizing it.

I'm willing to concede that I might have changed something, but, I can't for the life of me figure out what. I've upgraded and/or altered nothing within the last week that I can think of.

The deal is that I've got a local LAMP server, but it's not connected to the internet. It's just for local development and testing.

All the web sites I work on are in a directory called "web_sites" inside my home directory. Then I have a symlink in my /var/www directory, also called "web_sites" that points to the web_sites directory in /home/dave.

This has worked fine for ages, and then just yesterday, I tried to open one of my local web sites, as usual, and I got a "403 Forbidden" error.
"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server."

I went to http://localhost just to see if the directories were there, but the "web_sites" directory was not visible.

So I turned to the command prompt, and listed the contents of /var/www, and my "web_sites" symlink is there:
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   20 2007-06-27 09:41 web_sites -> /home/dave/web_sites

I thought it was odd that the ownership was "root root", so I tried:
sudo chown dave:dave web_sites
... but that hasn't changed anything. It still says the owner and group is "root".

Why is my chown command not working?

And why would I not be able to access the contents of the symlink with my local Apache server (after it's been working fine for so long)?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

-- 
Dave M G