Apache 403 Forbidden Errors After Nagios Install Attempt

[orware]

I followed the following Quick Start Fedora instructions for our RHEL4 box here at work to try and install Nagios:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ ... edora.html

I completed up until step 7 but I didn't restart Apache (which I was asked to do in step 5) until after I had completed step 7.

After I restarted the first thing I went to check was our school homepage:
http://imperial.edu/

And that's when I first say the 403 Forbidden Error. I was thinking this was due to permission issues but I fixed all the ones that would normally cause any trouble and things still haven't worked.

The weird thing is that Apache is running fine, it's just having trouble with something for that particular site because one subdomain:
http://cms.imperial.edu/

Is still working fine (the others I've checked are not.

It's a really weird issue and I don't want to pull out my hair any more than I have to if I can ask for some assistance ,

Thank you

Omar

[orware]

In order for people to not experience too much downtime with our site I've added a temporary redirect from imperial.edu to cms.imperial.edu so if you would like to see the error page this URL will be better:

http://michael-heumann.imperial.edu/

[scott]

Are you using ASL?

[orware]

I'm not using ASL (does it come with some type of monitoring software too?).

I was actually trying to get Nagios working because our new college president wanted us to begin sending weekly reports with all our server stats (disk, memory, cpu usage) so I was trying to get it installed on our web server so that we could compare it to a commercial software named Solarwinds Orion.

In the process of doing that it changed something, I'm just not not really sure what it was.

I actually found a thread of the SWSoft forums from two years ago where a user had a similar problem after trying to install Nagios but never found a resolution to it (at least on the forum):
http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php?t=10511&page=4

My temporary fix for the time being is to make those folders that are absolutely required have permissions of 751 for the httpdocs folder rather than the default 750...that's at least gotten the pages to display normally but I know it's not a true fix.

Any recommendations are still completely appreciated ,

[scott]

Yes, ASL does monitoring. It is focused on security, but it also alerts on general health issues (bad disks, segfaults, etc). I asked because we use the 403 error code in mod_security by default, which means "Forbidden". Its an error indicating you don't have permission to access a resource. A lot of things can cause that to return, .htaccess, Indexs, symlinking, etc.

[orware]

OK, I finally found a solution that was available on the SWSoft Forums:
http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php? ... ght=nagios

The problem was that during the Nagios installation, apache was removed from the psaserv group so psaserv no longer had the right to serve webpages.

To fix the problem I had to add apache back into the psaserv group:
usermod -G psaserv apache
(you can also use whereis to find the usermod command if typing in the results in a command not found error)

Then I had to restart Apache:
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

And after that everything was perfect .

[BerArt]

Yes, ASL does monitoring. It is focused on security, but it also alerts on general health issues (bad disks, segfaults, etc).

Witch part is doing this monitoring? Do you only get mail when something is wrong? Are there more plans for monitoring?

[scott]

OSSEC and PSMON. The first will look for anomalies in the logs, the latter will restart processes when they have died.