Topic: Web server file permissions question

[arnoldob]

Hello,
I restructured a webpage and moved around some files. I was looking at AWStats' "Pages Not Found" report and noticed I'm missing a lot of traffic from search engines because they refered to outdated links. I thought I could simply set up a symbolic link to drive requests to the new page. So I logged in as root and from /home/e-smith/files/primary/html I ran:

ln -s /home/e-smith/files/ibays/gallery/html/index.php Oldpage.html

This created an entry in the primary ibay directory as expected, but when I try to access from a browser I get a:

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

I guess that's an improvement over 404 page not found, but not much. Do I need to change permissions the file? If so, to what?

Thanks,
Arnoldo Bertoncini
http://www.bertoncini.net/

[mregan]

Sounds like an apache option.

Make sure you have the <directory> option FollowSymLinks in the httpd.conf file. I don't thing it is in the default package.

Remember you have to change the template.

A better solution would be putting a redirect in the html code (meta tags) or, since you are using index.php, have it return the right file with -

<?php
$oldPage = "<old page name>";
$newPage = file ($oldPage);
print_file($newPage);
?>