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My Raspian Apache2 does not seem to like the www folder on a RAspberry-3B USB drive, which I can easily access from my Windows network.
It keeps giving me
You don't have permission to access / on this server. Apache/2.4.25 (Raspbian) Server at 192.168.200.99 Port 80
All works OK however if the /var/www folder is used. And even PHP works OK.
My (abbreviated) setup is as follows-
FSTAB: 

UUID=1375-E205 /media/USBdrive32 vfat auto,sync,umask=000,gid=root,uid=root,rw 0 0

I can easily access this from Windows+Samba.
The Apache conf file is as follows- 

##### <Directory /var/www/>  
<Directory **/media/USBdrive32/www/**>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
</Directory>

the usb has the following permissions: (sample)
drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 16384 Sep 1 14:00
I have tried changing this to u= (me) g=www-data, but the same results are obtained.
Ideally, once this working, I'd like to change the whole USB media drive, or at least the www folder on it, to umask=004 or perhaps even 007.
I can edit the www folder from my Windows Notepad++ But Apache will not allow me to use it as a LAMP webserver.
Any ideas on where my 403 forbidden problem is?

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8
  • Why not change the uid & gid on your mount command to www-data as that's what Apache2 runs with.
    – Dougie
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 2:37
  • Been there, done that. i.e . User= (me) group=www-data. Ahh. I have not tried USER as www-data .... but the /var/html uses root and root. So why does it work OK?
    – aqk
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 2:38
  • Nope. UUID=1375-E205 /media/USBdrive32 vfat auto,sync,umask=000,gid=www-data,uid=www-data,rw 0 0 does not work either....
    – aqk
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 2:47
  • What shows up in /var/log/apache2/error.log when you get the 403?
    – Dougie
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 2:52
  • AHA! [Thu Feb 28 22:53:29.873091 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 5711] AH00163: Apache/2.4.25 (Raspbian) configured -- resuming normal operations [Thu Feb 28 22:53:29.873281 2019] [core:notice] [pid 5711] AH00094: Command line: '/usr/sbin/apache2' [Thu Feb 28 22:54:14.692808 2019] [authz_core:error] [pid 5729] [client 192.168.200.63:50309] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /var/www/html/ Somewhere it is still looking at /var/www... it must be something in an include in the .conf folder- I'll look at it...
    – aqk
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 4:00

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The Apache webserver used to have almost all its parameters in the parent file: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Now it's a case of modifying its includes.
In this case, specifically the /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-conf file, which now contains the <VirtualHost *:80>
The last time I used this (six months ago!), it was in its parent apache2.conf

Its DocumentRoot parameter must be changed from the /var/www/html/ to the FAT32 USB media file as set up in the fstab.
E.G. DocumentRoot /media/USBdrive32/www

All is OK now. Apache2 can access the www folder, AND I can edit it with either Windows-10 or Linux.

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