problem with some apache directives (multiviews)

[manarak]

I am using the gallery script piwigo on a domain hosted on a ISPC3 server (Apache2, Debian6) installed using Falko's How-To.

I am confronted with strange problems.

To enable SEO-friendly URLs in the gallery, I had to activate the following Apache directives:

AcceptPathInfo On
Options +MultiViews

But I get the following error in the error log:

(13)Permission denied: cannot read directory for multi:

Does anyone know what could be the cause?
I suppose it has something to do with ISPC3 default settings for websites or with default access rights, but I'm not sure.

[falko]

I guess it has to do with the secure permissions of the web/ directory. Usually you can ignore such warnings.

[manarak]

Thank you Falko - the problem is that the SEO friendly links produce a 404 - so I can't completely ignore it.

[falko]

Did you check the permissions of your .htaccess file?

[manarak]

I confess I did not - but I tried to put the Apache directives into Apache configuration, and the results were the same.

[manarak]

Solved!

Apparently, multiviews requires higher file permissions when the webserver's user is not in the same group as the owner of the files.

Setting file permissions to 750 solved my problem.

[manarak]

the problem came back... without me changing anything and inspite of everything being chmodded to 755.

hmmm....

[manarak]

there were new files (templates, temp files, stats, etc.) that were being created by the webserver with 644 permissions - that disrupted multiviews.

I got to find a solution around this.