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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T13:02:41+00:00

I have some graphics files that exist within a directory that a web server

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I have some graphics files that exist within a directory that a web server is hosted from. I want to re-use those graphics files for another webservice.

I created a symbolic link as follows:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root    root      51 Jun 30 03:47 gifs -> /var/www/vhosts/webservice/httpdocs/gifs

The gifs folder in question has the following permissions:

drwxr-xr-x  6 user2 psacln    4096 Jun  1 07:02 gifs

and a test file in there has this permission

-rw-r--r--  1 user1   psacln    1663 Jun 10 09:27 noimage.gif

So from the webservice I can view the file fine using http://www.windowsmobilesoft.net/gifs/noimage.gif

but if I use the webserver where the symbolic link is created I get a permission error

http://www.pocketpcsoft.net/gifs/noimage.gif

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access
/gifs/noimage.gif on this server.

Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at
http://www.pocketpcsoft.net Port 80

I added apache to the psacln group but this has not made any difference.

I suspect it’s something really simple that I need to do, but I cannot think what that is, can anyone help?

Thanks,

Greg

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Its more likely that your apache instance is configured not to follow symbolic links than you have a permissions problem.

    See options +symlinks

    Note that allowing apache to read symlinks may introduce vulnerabilities in your application – better solutions are:

    • use hard links (if the vhost doc roots will stay on the same filesystem)
    • use rewrite rules to map the image URL to the file
    • use alias to map the image URL to the file
    • just copy the damn files!
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