One Migrated site of a dozen is 403 Forbidden intermittantly

[Spiral]

Do you have mod_security or mod_evasive installed?

Either of the above can sometimes cause what you describe.

However ...

You also mentioned migrating. If you did that within the past 3 days,
it is likely that your connection is bouncing between the old server and new server
and you are seeing the 403 errors likely from the old server. In that case, give
it a little time and things will sort themselves out shortly.

 

[stardotstar]

[SOLVED]One Migrated site of a dozen is 403 Forbidden intermittantly

Hi guys,

Of all my migrated sites it appears that one has not gone over properly.

Sometimes I find that accessing the site by
Julie's Finger Food
works fine but more often than not the 403 Forbidden is the result.
Once it is responding this way it makes no difference if /index.html is specified or not you get:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Apache Server at Julie's Finger Food Port 80

or

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /index.html on this server.
Apache Server at Julie's Finger Food Port 80

sometimes one will work but the other method won't.

In researching this problem here and on the web I found various methods to rectify this when it is permissions or .htaccess related have not fixed it for me.

I have removed the .htaccess
I have deleted the files from the site and reuploaded them to public_html by ftp'ing in as the customer to ensure that permissions are correct.

I have checked the account in every way I know how and restarted the apache server - which on at least one occasion appeared to fix the problem, leading me at that time to suspect a stale configuration of that domain.

I am not convinced that it is not somehow a borked dns or account definition problem but I can't see that from the dns testing I have done or the review of the actual zone files.

This is the only zone/account which I am having persistant problems with - all the others are operating normally and I did the migration the same way in each case.

They are not database driven content. The site in question is flash and I wonder if it might be to do with scripts within the site but then it shouldn't work at all, not be an intermittant issue.

I would very much appreciate any thoughts you guys may have on this and furthermore would ask if I should go ahead and completely terminate the domain/account and start from scratch>?

BTW Oddly I am not seeing this error when logged in as the customer in their error logs?!!


Best regards and thanks in advance
Will

 

[stardotstar]

Hi Spiral, thank you for your reply!

I guess it could be propagation - when I did the migration i did it by moving the nameservers themselves from Helios on one pair of IPs to Jupiter on the new ones - changing the glue records. I suppose that whilst this does not involve propagating changes to the names servers (by name) for the migrating domains (ie at their registry) it still involves changing the desitnation IP that the name servers point to for those domains and therefore it amounts to a worldwide propagation anyway right? - So yes that is a very real possibility.

I am running mod_security but not mod_evasive (AFAIK - what is the quickest way to check the enabled mods:

./  ../  httpd.exp  libphp5.so*  mod_bwlimited.so*  mod_disable_suexec.so*  mod_security2.so*

Still yet to get my head around easyapache...

All the other sites are working fine and often the offending site comes up ok - I suppose I could hardwire my local resolver and see if I can ever get it to fail...

Thanks for the suggestions and such prompt assistance!
Best regards
Will


UPDATE - OK so I have made sure there is a version of the site back at the old server but the title now contains the year at the end - Julies Finger Food 2009 - I have also tested with a locally defined resolver set to ns1 and ns2 and I can't get it to fail. Switched back and yet to see the error or 2009 so I'll check again periodically.

 

[stardotstar]

Definitely DNS spiral - thanks for the prompting.
I grepped the access_log on Helios for the background image GET on juliesfingerfood and it is still getting used!
So having it on both servers will fix the problem until the resolver caches expire and refresh correctly!

Good to have that settled!
WIll

getting my head around easyapache and modules etc now.