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Apache2 under Ubuntu 12.04

I get a 403 error only sometimes when a URL is passed to a PHP script in WordPress via the PressThis button. e.g.

http://dev.wakawaka.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foohoo.org%2Fpb%2FThe-Future-of-Our-Schools&t=The%20Future%20of%20Our%20Schools%3A%20Teachers%20Unions%20and%20Social%20Justice%20%7C%20Haymarket%20Books&s=&v=4

This results in a 403 in the browser, and access.log is appended. But error.log is not appended.

Other URLs don't fail - they work properly, such as

"GET /wp-admin/press-this.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yeehaw.com%2Fproducts%2Fduet2.php&t=Apogee%20Duet%202%20-%202%20IN%20x%204%20OUT%20USB%20audio%20interface&s=&v=4 HTTP/1.1" 200 7962 "http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/duet2.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"

I have set loglevel to the most verbose setting of emerg. No error appears when the 403 is thrown.

Also, I have edited .htaccess to a minimal version that does no security and the condition still persists for some URLs.

Any ideas?

1 Answer 1

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By setting your LogLevel to Emerg (Emergencies - system is unusable.) you have reduced logging to it's minimum amount and only the most serious conditions are logged. You will need to increase log verbosity to at least Error to see 403's being logged.

LogLevel Error 

restart the apache service and you should be good.

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  • thanks. unfortunately, made the change, cleared browser cache, hit the offending URL as above and no change to error.log. The last entry shows the server restarting.
    – Miller
    Jan 22, 2013 at 13:05
  • @Miller: This works on the systems (Ubuntu and CentOS) I have to hand. Did you restart Apache after making the change ? Does the vhost you're connecting to have it's own ErrorLog directive ?
    – user9517
    Jan 22, 2013 at 13:27
  • did restart, no change. The server directive for the vhost in question is ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log with an accompanying CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
    – Miller
    Jan 22, 2013 at 13:55
  • I did notice that access.log is showing a 403 plus 407 error that I had overlooked. Here's an example of a URL that fails: pastebin.com/04f724Fc
    – Miller
    Jan 22, 2013 at 13:56
  • Note also please the error text presented in the browser reflects the 407 error, but I am logged in - to WordPress, so I don't understand what's going on. You are not authorized to access the webpage at dev.cityblocchicago.com/wp-admin/…. You may need to sign in.
    – Miller
    Jan 22, 2013 at 14:01

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