problem accessing directories under /var/www/html

[Ramsey, Robert L]

Ok, this is a really weird one, but I've seen it on two different servers.  The first is a RHEL server that I don't maintain, the second is the RHEL 6 Beta server I set up this morning, no customizations or anything.

Here's the behavior:

1)      #cd /var/www/html

2)      #wget somefile.tgz

3)      #tar xvf somefile.tgz

4)      Open firefox, go to http://localhost/somefile/index.html and get an access denied message.

5)      #cd /var/www/html

6)      #vi index.php [create a test page]

7)      Open firefox, http://localhost/index.php works correctly.

8)      #cd /var/www/html

9)      #mkdir test

10)   #cp index.php test/

11)   Open firefox, go to http://localhost/test/index.php works correctly.

12)   #cd /var/www/html

13)   #mkdir new

14)   #cp -r somefile/* new

15)   Open firefox, go to http://localhost/new/index.html and works correctly.

It does the same thing if I use a gui.  For example, I download somefile.tgz and open it Archive Manager.  I drag the folder from Archive Manager onto my desktop, then from there into /var/www/html.  Same behavior.

It fails doing this as root and doing it as a regular user.

The files are all owned by user:apache and all set to rwxrwxr-x or drwxrwxr-x for directories, so in theory the world can read them.

Other than outlining the steps to duplicate it, I don't even know a quick way to summarize this problem.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Bob