0s X Server Down For Maintenance?

Question

0s X Server Down For Maintenance?

After battling the dreaded '403 AccessDenied' error. Now I'm getting this error:

The website encountered an error while retrieving http://localhost/classes/05featuredemo. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly.

I am using OS 10.8.4, OS X Server 2.2.1

I am having trouble with only one site. The other two are working fine. Everything was working two days ago before I was getting the 403 error. What's going on?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Jul 10, 2013 10:08 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jul 10, 2013 12:13 PM in response to Timothy Stringer

What are the sites so others can try to duplicate your problem.

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Answer 2

Jul 11, 2013 6:29 AM in response to Eric Root

The site isn't on the web, it is on my test server.

I have no idea what I did, but the problem seems to be fixed.

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Answer 3

Jul 11, 2013 8:25 AM in response to Timothy Stringer

Based solely on that filename, it looks like you're trying to get the PHPExcel library to work.

FWIW, the HTTP 403 status is usually triggered by a file or directory protection error, which usually means that the www user (Apache) cannot read the files in the target directory referenced by the Server.app web server configuration.

That's usually a chown command and a chmod command to resolve, if you're comfortable with the command line. (Sorting this stuff out using the GUI is more work, but also possible.) Here's an overview of chmod and chown and Apache.

Also FWIW, I usually prefer to allow www only read access, but generally configure the web directories to deny write access to the www user, whenever that's possible. This because various web content management systems can be vulnerable and are occasionally breached, and preventing a breached content management system from writing to the web directories can make exploiting and extending the breach more difficult.

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