Apache 2 and RedHat Professional Workstation

[Dave Ihnat]

Gentlefolk,

I don't often post asking for advice, but in this case, I'd love it if
someone can give a 90-second answer that precludes hours of research.

I just installed RH Professional Workstation, and am trying to install
the latest release of Squirrelmail.  By default, Apache 2 is installed and
running from the RH RPMs; the copy of Squirrelmail is from their website
(squirrelmail.org).  I will note that I've much experience building/
installing/configuring Apache 1.3, but not 2.

Everything went well through running the Squirrelmail config.
Squirrelmail itself was installed in the document root as sm
(/var/www/html/sm). I did move the data directory to /var/squirrelmail,
as well as creating the attachments directory there.  For both, I added
permissions in the Apache config file of the form:

    <Directory "/var/squirrelmail/data">
      Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit Options
      Allow from all
      Order allow,deny
    </Directory>

(Yes, it's too open; this is the result of trying to get it to work.
I'll tighten it later.)  In all cases, everything is owner/group apache,
with permissions set appropriately (I believe.)

I also added a GIF file to the directory /var/www/html/sm/images to replace
the default squirrelmail image.

It *mostly* works--except (a) nothing I can do allows Squirrelmail to
write to the data directory, and (b) the GIF file can't be read.

For the data directory, I've opened Linux filesystem permissions as
far as 777 on the directory in testing (and on the parent directories),
AND moved it back under the 'sm' directory to see if being outside the
document root made a difference.  (Obviously, it didn't.)

For the image, I get the default "Forbidden" screen--plus "Additionally, a
403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to
handle the request."  This would have to be a default document configured
by the RH Apache RPM, since I haven't modified anything in error handling.

The curious thing is, if I convert the image to a PNG file using a
locally- compiled version of gif2png, it DOES display, so this isn't a
filesystem permissions error.  (No, that's not the solution--I need to
be able to display GIFs on demand, too.)  Doesn't the default RH Apache
2 config display GIFs by default?

Pointers on this would be greatly welcomed.  And if you want to throw in,
"It's *this* obvious--you should have KNOWN that!" comments, they're in order,
too.

TIA,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	ignatz at dminet.com