Re: Apache can't use directory not in root partition?

Roger N. Clark (change username to rnclark) wrote: 
Hi,
I just brought up red hat workstation 4 and I am trying to
get the apache server running.

I have 3 partitions:

/
/home
/a

The default httpd.conf file has DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"
which works fine, and I can change it to something like
/usr/local/html, but if i change it to /home/smith/html
or /a/www/html apache fails on startup giving an error
at the DocumentRoot line number saying DocumentRoot must
be a directory.  I've checked multiple times and it is a
valid directory and is readable (uid=root gid=root rwxr-xr-x)
with same permissions as /var/www/html.

I've also tried setting up virtual hosts, and while I do not
get start-up errors, I can't see the contents of the
directories on /home or /a, but can see the contents just fine
with directories in the root partition.

Any ideas?  Or does apache 2.0 need to serve documents in the
root partition only?  I've been running web servers on linux
and/or unix for about a decade and have never had this problem.

Thanks for any help/ideas
Roger Clark


I have a partial solution:

The problem is an SELinux issue and is described on this web site:

http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/apachebasic.htm

"SELinux security context labels can be modified using the chcon command.
Recognizing the error, user root uses chcon with the -R (recursive) and -h
(modify symbolic links) qualifiers to modify the label of the directory to
httpd_sys_content_t with the -t qualifier."

  chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html

So when I do this, everything works in /var/www/html
So then I change DocumentRoot to /a/www/html and run the chcon
command, but I still can't get it to work there.

Roger
.

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