Forbidden (403)

https://www.howtoforge.com/community/threads/forbidden-error-403-unable-to-access-web-pages.43789/ browser reports either 403 Forbidden errors, or 403 Forbidden and/or 404 Document not Found. The server error log reports: [crit] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] (13)Permission denied: /var/www/mydomain.com/web/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable Prior to this error, I was opening pages ok, right up until I used ISPConfig to create a sub-domain with a redirect path instruction. After that, nothing would open at all: unable to http://mydomain.com , http://www.mydomain.com, http://mydomain.com/path-to-subdom-index.html , etc. All of them get 403's now, whereas before using ISPConfig sub-domain tool, those would open content. It's baffling, because the prior server also used ISPConfig 3 and ubuntu 9.10, and I don't recall encountering these problems. Any help deeply appreciated... Elliott skyeman, Mar 2, 2010 #1 falko Super Moderator ISPConfig Developer What's the output of Code: ls -la /var/www/mydomain.com/web/ server unable to ? falko, Mar 3, 2010 #2 skyeman New Member Hello, Falco, and thanks for the reply... ls -la yields: Code: [emailprotected]:/var/www/mydomain.com/web# ls -la total 32 drwx--x--- 4 root root 4096 2010-03-03 12:30 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-01-18 10:10 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 web1 client0 4096 2010-03-02 18:33 error -rw-r--r-- 1 web1 client0 1406 2010-03-02 18:33 favicon.ico -rw-r--r-- 1 web1 client0 683 2010-03-02 18:33 feed.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 web1 client0 0 2010-03-02 18:33 .htaccess -rw-r--r-- 1 web1 client0 1861 2010-03-02 18:33 index.html -rw-r--r-- 1 web1 client0 34 2010-03-02 18:33 robots.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 web1 client0 4096 2010-03-02 00:30 stats For http://mydomain.com , this produces: Forbidden "You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." associated with this in the server log: Code: [Wed Mar 03 12:40:20 2010] [crit] [client 66.xxx.xxx.xxx] (13)Permission denied: /var/www/mydomain.com/web/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable [Wed Mar 03 12:40:20 2010] [error] [client 66.xxx.xxx.xxx] File does not exist: /usr/share/apache2/error/403.html Interestingly, cat .htaccess reveals an empty file. Huh? Can that be right? The sub-domain structure of the system which had hdd f