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

More fun with Apache.

There was a time when I could configure Apache without the help of Google. Alas, that time was years ago.

I wanted several versions of Apache on my machine so that I could test different mod_cluster configurations side by side.

I downloaded the Apache source, built it and put in "/examples" under my home directory. After I started it I got :

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

I immediately checked the directory permissions. They looked okay. I spent some time monkeying with the SELinux security settings.

The problem was simple: Apache needs execute permissions all the way up to the root directory.

Simply moving my "examples" directory to the root fixed it.