Symbolic link > not allowed or link target not accessible [closed]

Question

Ever since my hard-drive crashed, I've been backing up data to Dropbox.
But I've also been symlinking all my data folders to my Dropbox sub-folders.
After installing Apache on my Ubuntu desktop, I symlinked username to my Dropbox sub-folder.

anjanesh@anjanesh-desktop:/var/www$ sudo ln -s ~/Dropbox/www anjanesh

But when I goto h-t-t-p://localhost/anjanesh/ I get

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /anjanesh/ on this server.
Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Server at localhost Port 80

I checked the error log :

[Sun Aug 19 22:07:41 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/anjanesh

I don't seem to see anything wrong with the permissions.

anjanesh@anjanesh-desktop:/var/www$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Aug 19 21:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Aug 19 11:19 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   26 Aug 19 21:55 anjanesh -> /home/anjanesh/Dropbox/www
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  177 Aug 19 11:20 index.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   20 Aug 19 16:23 phpinfo.php
anjanesh@anjanesh-desktop:/var/www$ 

Any idea what might be wrong ?

Answer 1

Have a look at the Options directive. Simply add FollowSymLinks to your virtual host configuration (or wherever applicable) and it should work.

The webserver usually runs as www-run or www-data or some other user. Make sure that user is allowed to access your data as well. So if you can, make your Dropbox web directory world-accesable and world-readable, or add the webserver user to your usergroup.