magento installation and client denied by server configuration error

[pawan]

I have a magento installation on one of the site, which shows lot of error like this

[Sat Mar 31 19:02:51 2012] [error] [client 192.168.0.1] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/example.com/web/app/etc/local.xml
[Sat Mar 31 19:03:03 2012] [error] [client 192.168.0.1] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/example.com/web/app/etc/local.xml
[Sat Mar 31 19:03:19 2012] [error] [client 192.168.0.1] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/example.com/web/app/etc/local.xml
[Sat Mar 31 19:03:28 2012] [error] [client 192.168.0.1] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/example.com/web/app/etc/local.xml

please suggest a direction to identify the problem. Thanks.

[till]

please post the output of:

ls -la /var/www/example.com/web/app/etc/

[pawan]

The output for ls -la you suggested is like this

drwxr-xr-x 3 web77 client48 4096 2012-02-26 14:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 web77 client48 4096 2012-02-26 12:53 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 web77 client48 5257 2012-02-26 12:52 config.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 web77 client48 2357 2012-02-26 14:08 local.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 web77 client48 3455 2012-02-26 12:52 local.xml.additional
-rw-r--r-- 1 web77 client48 2228 2012-02-26 12:52 local.xml.template
drwxr-xr-x 2 web77 client48 4096 2012-04-02 23:38 modules

[falko]

Do you have an .htaccess file somewhere that prevents access to the files in that directory?