I upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise from Fedora Core 7 recently. I wasn't running SELinux on the Fedora box but decided to try it out on the shiney new RHE server.

I ran into seemingly simple problem, my apache log was reporting a 403 - Forbidden permission denied to index.php when trying to access a simple test index.php in one of my virtual hosts. This is something that I've done probably 120 times before in only minutes, but it took me about 3 hours last night to get to the bottom of this. I figure it deserves a post as a personal note, and hopefully save others the time and a headache.

I tried all the obvious stuff, chmod’s, chown’s, etc, on the files and directory, nothing. I checked the virtual host directive like 20 times, compared permissions with other sites that were working. Everything was correct. I called my dad, he mentioned that he had recently configured the new server to jail other system users to their respective website home folders when using FTP. This must have had something to do with it, but anyways it pointed me in the right direction.

The command that saved the day:
chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html/mywebsite/*

The command recommended by "SEtroubleshoot Browser" that didn't work:
restorecon -R -v /var/www/html/mywebsite

Intersting tid-bit for troubleshooting SELinux:

If you're running SELinux and you suspect that it's the cause of a problem on your system, you can use System > Administration > SELinux Administrator, to temporarily suspend it by setting the "Current Enforcing Mode" to "Permissive". This way you don’t have to completely disable it which WILL force you to reboot because it needs to re-label your entire file system.