Symptom
A Web client attempting to access a site served by Mac OS X Server receives this message:
Figure 1 The "403 Forbidden" message in Microsoft Internet Explorer
Solution
Client workaround
Note: Only the administrator of the Mac OS X Server computer can resolve this issue. If you are a client, refer your Web server administrator to this article. As a workaround, you can try adding common page names to the end of the Web address, such as:
index.html
index.htm
index.php
default.html
Server Admin solution
This occurs when you have set up a Web site for multiple default Web pages without using required punctuation (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Incorrect: the "Default document name" field
When specifying multiple default pages in the Server Admin application, put quotation marks around the name of each document. If you wanted the Web server to try three different names when looking for a default document, you would specify the entry as in this example:
This would cause the Web server to use the index.html page as the default page unless that document doesn't exist, in which case it would try index.htm and then default.html. Figure 3 demonstrates how the server should look if set up for to search for two page names.
Figure 3 Correct: the "Default document name" field with quotation marks
A Web client attempting to access a site served by Mac OS X Server receives this message:
- "403 Forbidden"
"You don't have permission to access / on this server."
Figure 1 The "403 Forbidden" message in Microsoft Internet Explorer
Solution
Client workaround
Note: Only the administrator of the Mac OS X Server computer can resolve this issue. If you are a client, refer your Web server administrator to this article. As a workaround, you can try adding common page names to the end of the Web address, such as:
index.html
index.htm
index.php
default.html
Server Admin solution
This occurs when you have set up a Web site for multiple default Web pages without using required punctuation (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Incorrect: the "Default document name" field
When specifying multiple default pages in the Server Admin application, put quotation marks around the name of each document. If you wanted the Web server to try three different names when looking for a default document, you would specify the entry as in this example:
- "index.html" "index.htm" "default.html"
This would cause the Web server to use the index.html page as the default page unless that document doesn't exist, in which case it would try index.htm and then default.html. Figure 3 demonstrates how the server should look if set up for to search for two page names.
Figure 3 Correct: the "Default document name" field with quotation marks