Re: [tlug] Can't Change ownership of symlink

["Keith Bawden" <keith@example.com>]

> 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

Ideally you should chown the files to the same uid and gid as that of
the web server. I would also recommend more restrictive permissions
for "others".

What does "ls -l /home/dave/web_sites" give you?

Since you mentioned you have not changed anything. I'm assuming that
the FollowSymLinks option in your apache config files (or .htaccess)
is unchanged...

>  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?

You must be root to chown those links. They are owned by root...

Regards, Keith