Error 403

What could cause this error:

403 Forbidden

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /index.htm
on this server.

Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.domain.com Port 80

It was intermitten for a while, but seems constant now. Earlier pages would load, but not all the graphics, and different ones would load if you refreshed, or the page itself would give an Error 403. Now every page gives an Error 403.

I'm piggybacking on my friend's server, and all their sites work fine (as does one of my other sites on this box). Is there any reason this would happen "on it's own" ?

www.domain.com
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Any chance the permissions were changed on the server side of things?

KC
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Not that I know of, maybe the hosting company because this site got popular all of a sudden and has getting a lot of hits. But why would it be intermitten like that? Sometimes things worked, sometimes they didn't, within seconds of each other. Maybe something to do with the number of connections to the server?

www.domain.com
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Are you sure the site is hosted on one particular server and not multiple servers behind a load balancer? 

Jon Lindbo
Thursday, August 5, 2004

An "intermitten" error? Switch to gloves. :)

sgf
Thursday, August 5, 2004

ha ha ha.

Yes, one server, I've talked to them about it on several occasions, but I can ask again.

www.domain.com
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Yes, only 1.

www.domain.com
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Maybe it returns 403 if you exceed your hourly bandwidth cap.

Kalani
Thursday, August 5, 2004

No, it just shuts down if it exceeds it's bandwidth cap, and they have to restart it.... We know this already. ;-)

The current theory is exceeding it's connections limit, but that doesn't seem right because it's *always* giving a 403 now.

Oh well. I should be on a new host soon. You get what you pay for.

www.domain.com
Thursday, August 5, 2004

"intermitten" 403's are probably a result of caching. If you're not allowed access, you're not allowed access.

clear your browser cache, then make sure your web/app server isn't  caching stuff server-side. You should then get the error 100% of the time.

if your on a unix-ish server: check file permissions with "ls -l" they shoud all have at least "r" for everything. If you recently did an update via ftp/scp this could be the issue.

otherwise, have your hosting people send the appropriate section of their httpd.conf file for your virtual host, it could be in there.

PopCulture
Thursday, August 5, 2004

also, make sure you have the default page set. You should probably always disallow directory browsing in httpd.conf, but if thats the case and the default page is not set to (or does not exist as), say, index.html, you will get a 403...

PopCulture
Thursday, August 5, 2004

The permissions for index.htm is -rw-r--r--, for the web root drwxrwsr-x, for any folder I created drwxr-sr-x, and any file -rw-r--r--

www.domain.com
Friday, August 6, 2004

>"intermitten" 403's are probably a result of caching. If you're
>not allowed access, you're not allowed access.

I was holding down CTRL + SHIFT when I was refreshing, and *different* images would load, and every 3rd or 4th time the page wouldn't load. Then the next time it would.

www.domain.com
Friday, August 6, 2004

"I was holding down CTRL + SHIFT when I was refreshing, and *different* images would load, and every 3rd or 4th time the page wouldn't load. Then the next time it would."

most app server & web servers do caching at the server level, so whatever you do at the client/browser (MSIE)  level may not have the effect you desire... you might want to blow the cache away on the server?...

PopCulture
Friday, August 6, 2004

Ah, I have expected you meant that, but wasn't sure it actually happened. That would explain why it switched over to all Error 403's after a while.

Okay, so there's some permission in some config file somewhere on the server that's causing this.

In other words, I have to wait for them to get around to fixing it.

Thanks.

www.domain.com
Friday, August 6, 2004

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