I've got an Xserve serving some web sites, and a particular directory in one of the sites is acting really strangely lately.
Basically, it's throwing 403 "Forbidden" errors. But it is really inconsistent about it. Sometimes, the HTML page itself will come back 403, presenting the error document to me. Sometimes, the HTML page comes in fine, but the style sheet comes back 403, so the page is unstyled. Other times, both come back fine. Sometimes, just the print style sheet is forbidden, so it looks fine unless you try to print it.
Watching the 'Activity' window in Safari while repeatedly reloading a file in the directory, I'll see different documents referenced by the web page come back as forbidden, different ones with each reload. As far as I can tell, it's random which pages come back fine and which ones come back 403.
More curiously, if I restart the web service, the problem goes away for a few hours and then returns. When I finally went to bed defeated last night, I checked it in the morning, and it came back solid 403 until I restarted the web service again, so it apparently gets worse over time.
The usual culprits of 403 errors aren't to blame here - I have triple-checked the permissions. Nothing is changing the permissions on those files, especially moment-to-moment like that, so it's obviously something else.
I have tried uploading a new version of the directory from my home computer, but that did not fix it. I've also repaired permissions on the server. Both things seemed to fix it at first, but then a few hours later, the problem would resurface.
The weird thing about it is that this is just another non-special subdirectory. There are sibling subdirectories to this one that work fine. There are no special .htaccess files or anything between them.
All I can think of is either disk corruption, or maybe something like multiple processes trying to access those .html or .css files at the same time, locking each other out. Or maybe the server doesn't have enough connections free, and is sending back 403's for some reason.
Any ideas? I'm at my wit's end here.
Basically, it's throwing 403 "Forbidden" errors. But it is really inconsistent about it. Sometimes, the HTML page itself will come back 403, presenting the error document to me. Sometimes, the HTML page comes in fine, but the style sheet comes back 403, so the page is unstyled. Other times, both come back fine. Sometimes, just the print style sheet is forbidden, so it looks fine unless you try to print it.
Watching the 'Activity' window in Safari while repeatedly reloading a file in the directory, I'll see different documents referenced by the web page come back as forbidden, different ones with each reload. As far as I can tell, it's random which pages come back fine and which ones come back 403.
More curiously, if I restart the web service, the problem goes away for a few hours and then returns. When I finally went to bed defeated last night, I checked it in the morning, and it came back solid 403 until I restarted the web service again, so it apparently gets worse over time.
The usual culprits of 403 errors aren't to blame here - I have triple-checked the permissions. Nothing is changing the permissions on those files, especially moment-to-moment like that, so it's obviously something else.
I have tried uploading a new version of the directory from my home computer, but that did not fix it. I've also repaired permissions on the server. Both things seemed to fix it at first, but then a few hours later, the problem would resurface.
The weird thing about it is that this is just another non-special subdirectory. There are sibling subdirectories to this one that work fine. There are no special .htaccess files or anything between them.
All I can think of is either disk corruption, or maybe something like multiple processes trying to access those .html or .css files at the same time, locking each other out. Or maybe the server doesn't have enough connections free, and is sending back 403's for some reason.
Any ideas? I'm at my wit's end here.