mod autoindex puzzle (Apache Users)

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to apache2.x and its configuration, but last week I encountered a strange problem that's really puzzling me. I decided to ask here for help. I would be grateful if someone could answer me to find what I'm missing.

That said, this is the context:

we were happily running a php-7.3-apache-buster container image in our swarm cluster as a service, with some modules enabled, among them autoindex module.

The apache2 container binds two volumes on a NFS share mount point visible from all the cluster machines; one for the apache2 configuration files (aka /etc/apache2) and one for the served content (aka /var/www/html).

We are facing a really strange problem with autoindex module that has run fine till about a week ago.

After a service restart using UCP, autoindex seems not to be able to load HeaderName and ReadmeName files when serving folders for which server generated directory listing is required and setup.

So both our HEADER and FOOTER html files are not loaded anymore by autoindex module.

We check apache logs after raising logs to trace8 for the autoindex module and then also for all the server activity, but we were not able to find any error. HEADER and FOOTER html files exist in the correct location and are valid html files with no errors.

We made then some changes to apache2.conf and the relevant .htaccess files we are using to override the default behaviour of autoindex module and we find that apache is correctly parsing them and reacting to our changes the ways we expected in all cases BUT the HeaderName and ReadmeName directives. It seems like apache2 is ignoring these two directives.

We are stuck, and with great probability the cause of this behaviour will be a trivial error on our side but after days, with almost equal probability, we are not able to see it. Maybe someone else will do in a few seconds.

We can give all the apache2 configuration files and setup, if needed, except ldap and other possible sensible data we have in them.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, have a nice day.

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