Salocin

Movable Type and the Forbidden Error

I moved from one server to another recently, and for some reason my Movable type stopped working (hence the lack of articles for some time). When I finally found the time to do a little research, I figured it out, and so am posting here what happened to me so that you can fix it if it's happened to you.

The error was : FORBIDDEN : You don't have permission to access xyz.cgi on this server, or something of the kind.

I thought it was an access permissions thing, so I opened a shell to the server and sest all the permissions to 777 to check it, but nothing worked - so I changed them all back, and started browsing the web under the assumption that it was something to do with the CGI files not executing rather than the access permissions per se.

I finally looked in the apache error log and found that ExecCGI had not been activated in this directory. So armed with this knowledge, returned to various search engines and found the answer I was looking for here.

What you need to do is edit (or create) the .htaccess file in the directory with the CGIs in it, and add the line Options ExecCGI. This will solve the problem. It's really quite simple once you know, but when you don't know, it can be quite frustrating.