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So I'm pretty new to servers; I've been running websites off of 3rd party hosts, but I thought I might like to try it on my own for once. I got a Raspberry Pi running Raspian Wheezy, and I successfully installed Apache2.

When I tested Apache for the first time before modifying any settings, it returned the "Everything is working fine!" message. However, I have an external USB drive that I wanted my webroot to reside on. I went into the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, and changed the DocumentRoot and Directory from /var/www/ to the following address that specifies a folder I made in my mounted device.

 DocumentRoot /media/888F-2455/www/ <Directory /media/888F-2455/www/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory>

When I tried to load my localhost again, I was met with a 403 forbidden error. After doing some looking around, it seemed that taking ownership of the folder would solve this problem. I tried inputting sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /media/888F-2455/www into my root terminal, but I was told 

chown: changing ownership of `/media/888F-2455/www/index.html': Operation not permitted

Which I can't understand since I'm a root user using the root terminal.

What is going on here and how can I fix it? Please answer like you're talking to an 8 year old because I'm not very adept at linux or apache at this point in time.

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  • You shouldn't give a webserver write access. Just make the files in question readable by the webserver using something like chmod -R a+r /media/888F-2455/www Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 14:00

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This message usually indicates the filesystem is in read only mode or not fully supported.

Please check the following:

  • which filesystem is the external drive formated with? (mount| grep media)
  • is the drive mounted rw (same as above)

If the external drive is formated with fat/fat32/ntfs this is your problem.

If not then unmount the drive (do not unplug it), run a filesystem check and mount again explicitly specifying rw (mount -o noatime,rw /dev/... /media/..)

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  • i figured this out last night, it was the filesystem. after i reformatted to ext4 it was all good Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 20:18

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