Apache 403 Forbidden Error when accessing local web server using local IP address

Posted by amjo324 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by amjo324
Published on 2013-10-19T12:24:28Z Indexed on 2013/10/20 3:57 UTC
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I have an odd problem when attempting to browse to pages stored on a local web server (Apache 2.2). The pages are served as expected when I browse to localhost or 127.0.0.1 on port 80. Yet when I attempt to browse to the same pages by referencing the local IP address (192.168.x.x), I receive a HTTP 403 (Forbidden) error. In essence, http://localhost:80 works but 192.168.x.x:80 doesn't even though I'm specifying the IP of the local machine. You may be thinking "who cares? just use localhost". However, this is the first step in troubleshooting why I cannot remotely access these pages from different hosts on my LAN.

I'm presuming this can't be a firewall issue as I'm only connecting to the local machine. Even so, I verified there was no iptables rules that could be having an effect.

I've checked the Apache error logs and the corresponding line of relevance is:

[Sat Oct 19 07:38:35 2013] [error] [client 192.168.x.x] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/

I've inspected most of the apache config files and they don't appear to differ from what you would expect with a default install. I can't see anything in apache2.conf that would be a problem and httpd.conf is an empty file. This is an excerpt from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

    DocumentRoot /var/www
    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            allow from all
    </Directory>

Any insight as to where I can look next to find a solution ?

Thanks in advance.

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