Location access control: document contained no data

Hi I'm having trouble setting up authorisation on a virtual name host. I have an alias which is above the document root which i want to be open to the public, and the rest of the site to be password protected. However with the configuration below the http://name.company.co.nz/public/ area is public but when i point my browser at http://name.company.co.nz/ the browser returns "document contained no data" and the access_log shows a 401 error.

If i remove the <Location /public/> ... </Location> section from the configuration the password protected part of the site works as expected, but of course you still require a password to access the /public/ area, which is not what i want.

Can anyone please give me a hint as to what i am doing wrong?


<VirtualHost 123.456.789.10>
ServerName name.company.co.nz
ServerAdmin greg.bryant@company.co.nz
DocumentRoot /www/html

Alias /perl-scripts/ /www/html/perl-scripts/
Alias /public/perl-scripts/ /www/public/perl-scripts/
Alias /public/ /www/public/
Alias /incl/ /www/html/incl/

<Location />
Options IncludesNOEXEC
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
AuthName "Extranet"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /www/auth/allusers
Require valid-user
Satisfy any
</Location>

<Location /mgmt/>
Options IncludesNOEXEC
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
AuthName "Management Area"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /www/auth/allusers
AuthGroupFile /www/auth/allgroups
Require group mgmt
Satisfy any
</Location>

<Location /public/>
Options IncludesNOEXEC
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Location>

<Location /perl-scripts/>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::Registry
Options +ExecCGI
</Location>

<Location /public/perl-scripts/>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::Registry
Options +ExecCGI
</Location>

ErrorDocument 401 /public/

</VirtualHost>

[Edited by Greg Bryant on 02-27-2001 at 09:36 PM]

First off, you are using Satisfy incorrectly. Start here -> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/core.html#satisfy

To use Satisfy directive, you need to check the following lines in bold:

<Location />
Options IncludesNOEXEC
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 111.222.333.444 # replace it with your IP, the value of REMOTE_ADDR.
AuthName "Extranet"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /www/auth/allusers
Require valid-user
Satisfy any
</Location>

Since you have multiple <Location> blocks, you must use <LocationMatch> with regex instead.

i.e.

<LocationMatch ^/public/perl-scripts/$>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::Registry
Options +ExecCGI
</LocationMatch>

Also, <Location> or <LocationMatch> will slow down Apache significantly. You probably want to reduce the number of that by removing perl-scripts from your Location block. BTW, mod_perl doesn't need to be executed within a directory, you can enable it globally so to reduce the number of <LocationMatch> to speed things up:

<LocationMatch ^/>
Options IncludesNOEXEC +ExecCGI
AddHandler perl-script .pl
PerlHandler Apache::Registry
..
</LocationMatch>

With this, <LocationMatch ^/perl-scripts/$> and <LocationMatch ^/public/perl-scripts/$> are no longer needed. The downside is to enable ExecCGI globally.

Also be sure to remove .pl from AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl if you use AddHandler perl-script .pl.

[Edited by freebsd on 02-28-2001 at 07:05 PM]

Thanks for that,
I managed to get it going last night (before i had your reply) by reordering the Location sections and changing the
ErrorDocument 401 /public/
to
ErrorDocument 401 /public/index.shtml

But it seemed pretty dodgy, so i will change to the LocationMatch directives.

Thanks for the advice.

>> ErrorDocument 401 /public/index.shtml

Oh yeah, I didn't notice that. That supposed to point to a file.