[users@httpd] httpd occasional 403 error

Dominique Fober <fober@xxxxxxxx> · Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:44:03 +0200

Hi,

I'm running apache on a linux station (detailed versions below) and I 

get occasional 403 errors (Directory index forbidden). What I mean by 

'occasional' is that using the same config files, it works almost well 

but fails only on some seldom unpredictable requests (between 1 to 5 

times per day).

I'm investigating the problem for a couple of weeks, without success, 

but trying a simulation using wget (v. 1.9.1) I've discovered the 

following:

using the following script
	while [ 1 ]
	do
		wget -r http://www.myserver.root/
		sleep 3
	done
I get 2 successful replies followed by 6 or 7 error 403

when I change the sleep delay, the number of failure changes but the 

failure period remains around 20 seconds ie: I get 403 errors during 20 

sec. after the last successful request.

I can completely avoid these 403 errors using the '--cache=off' on the 

wget command line. I'm therefore suspecting that some 'cache strategy' 

could be involved in the problem but looking at the documentation, I 

can't find any explanation (cache seems to be mainly related to proxy 

and there is none in the local config and when I use wget).

Here is some additional information:

- the server and system version numbers:

Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/2.0.50 (Mandrakelinux/7.3.101mdk) 

mod_perl/1.99_16 Perl/v5.8.5 mod_ssl/2.0.50 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PHP/4.3.8

Linux 2.6.8.1-12mdksmp #1 SMP Fri Oct 1 11:24:45 CEST 2004 i686 

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (official Mandrake 10.1)

- some reports from error_log:

[Thu Aug 25 11:15:09 2005] [error] [client 81.199.84.124] Directory 

index forbidden by rule: /home/www/html/Creation/Residences/Giroudon/

[Mon Aug 29 17:57:14 2005] [error] [client 194.5.49.22] Directory index 

forbidden by rule: /home/www/html/

errors are on any folder, access rights have been controled

- an excerpt of the commonhttpd.conf
<Directory /home/www/html>
    Options -Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    <IfModule mod_access.c>
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
    </IfModule>
</Directory>

Thanks in  advance for any help,
---
Dominique Fober

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