Hi there,

I have the following situation:

1. My domain name is managed by a registrar in my country. The only thing I use them for is IP Forwarding. So I logged into their control panel and created a subdomain.domain.com and then entered the IP number of my Linode instance in the A-Record.

2. Then on my Linode instance, I created a new subdomain in /etc/apache2/subdomain.domain.com by creating a new VirtualHost. The document root is located at ~/public/subdomain.domain.com/public

Problem:

When I try to call up subdomain.domain.com in the browser I get a page that says:



However, this page does not appear to be on my Linode instance! It appears to be a page on some server belonging to my registrar (I do not use their hosting, only IP Forwarding).

Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Thanks.

Chances are it is pointing to your Linode and apache is just telling you it doesn't have permission to access it. Can you show the output of:

$ ls -lh ~/public/subdomain.domain.com/public

That will show a listing of files, as well as permissions (represented by the letters r(ead), w(rite), and x(ecute), and user/group ownership.

Either the user or group (or both) should be set to the user that Apache uses, and that user or group needs (at a minimum) read and execute permission for all directories it needs access to, and read permissions for all files it needs.

_________________
Kris the Piki Geeker

Here is the output:

mope@ubuntu:~/public$ ls -lh subdomain.domain.com
total 12K
drwxrwxr-x 2 mope mope 4.0K Jul 6 00:01 backup
drwxrwxr-x 2 mope mope 4.0K Jul 6 00:07 logs
drwxrwxr-x 12 mope mope 4.0K Jul 6 23:59 public

What makes you sure that the page returned isn't on your server?

What are the permissions of all the parent directories?

Is DocumentRoot literally ~/public/subdomain.domain.com/public? ~ is short hand for the current user's home directory, and your webserver will be running as a user that is not "mope".

Also, please don't redact, it helps us cross-check a few things, including that your a record is set properly.

Because the page that is appearing contains an iFrame with an unknown (to me) source IP.



mope@ubuntu:~$ ls -lh public
total 8.0K
drwxrwxr-x 5 mope mope 4.0K Jun 9 21:51 domain.com
drwxrwxr-x 5 mope mope 4.0K Jul 6 11:23 subdomain.domain.com



I am not using the short hand in my VirtualHost file, instead I am using this: /home/mope/public/subdomain.domain.com/public

(But mind you I have this very same set up for domain.com and everything is working fine)

I realize this is a stupid question, but since everything seems to be configured the same and both sites should be displaying: did you restart the apache service?

What do your logs say?

Yup restarted several times since making the changes



I will have a look at the logs later today.

One strange thing I just noticed is that if I try to visit subdomain.domain.com from the office I still get the 403 page, but without the iframe page I see at home?? No idea what that means.

One other thing I just realized, in my VirtualHost file for my subdomain I have for both ServerName and ServerAlias: subdomain.domain.com

Because looking at some examples online, I see for example this setup: ServerName: subdomain.domain.com and ServerAlias www.domain.com

Could this be issue? (Can't check it right now).

When I click on your links (www.domain.com and subdomain.domain.com) both of them resolve to a web page.

So what exactly is the problem again???

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

These are obviously examples.

When I view subdomain.domain.com from my iPhone it works and I can see the site hosted on the sub domain. But when I view it from my computer, I get a 403??

I finally figured it out.

Under domain.com I have an .htaccess file forcing HTTPS.

Under subdomain.domain.com I have a Piwik installation and that doesn't seem to like this and was throwing a 403.

I disabled the .htaccess for now and I can access subdomain.domain.com

In the future, please don't redact information - it impedes us helping you.

No, they're obvious TIME WASTERS.

Domain names by their nature are PUBLIC, so hiding them makes zero sense.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.