I'm trying to get started with lighttpd on Fedora 16 to run a RESTful api for development. Right now even with the most basic sample config file I'm getting 404 pages when I know the pages I'm pointing at exist. From reading other questions I'm leaning towards this being a permissions issue, but I'm confused about how lighttpd runs on Fedora.

There's a user called "lighttpd" not "www-data"? I can't see this user in the system-config-users tool and I can't su into it to check which permissions it has.

I'm trying to point lighttpd to "/var/www/lighttpd" which has some example pages in it. The permissions for the files inside are set to -rw-r--r-- and the permissions for the folder containing them are drwxr-xr-x. Doesn't that mean that any user can view these files?

I'm not sure what else I should be checking as I don't have much experience with server configuration. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: I was following the tutorial configuration here so the lighttpd.conf file contains

server.document-root = "/var/www/lighttpd/" 

server.port = 3000

mimetype.assign = (
  ".html" => "text/html", 
  ".txt" => "text/plain",
  ".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
  ".png" => "image/png" 
)

and I was just trying to get the basic example page working.