Why is my custom error files relative to each virtual host (apache)?

Question

First off, my server config is openSUSE 11.4 and my web server is apache 2.2.

I want to change the error files for the web server, but I can't get apache to understand that the error files are not relative to each virtual host!

I edited error.conf in /etc/apache and removed all the crap about localization (don't care about that) and added:

ErrorDocument 404 /srv/www/errors/404.html

Restart apache and then I try to access something that doesn't exist.

The output is:

Not Found The requested URL /notadocument was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I check the error log and see this:

[Mon Aug 01 15:34:36 2011] [error] [client x.x.x.x] File does not exist: /home/andreas/www/notadocument
[Mon Aug 01 15:34:36 2011] [error] [client x.x.x.x] File does not exist: /home/andreas/www/srv

As you can see, apache tries to look in the directory of my vhost, not in the root of the server!

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

I'm guessing from what you said above that you are trying to point to files not served up by apache and are instead just locally accessible?

If that's the case then I can provide you with a partial answer. What you will probably want to do is add a type directive to your vhosts file... More info on Directory. That should allow Apache to access that location. You might even want to alias the directory as well.

Like I said it's a partial answer as it isn't something I've ever tried before, but since there aren't any other answers here yet... hopefully this helps you get in the right direction.