I have been battling with an issue on Fedora Core 20 and Apache recently with an issue around receiving this error when trying to mount a virtual host in Apache and setting the DocumentRoot to a share under /mnt.

The error is:

[Mon May 12 21:42:02.632785 2014] [core:error] [pid 3974] (13)Permission denied: [client 192.168.1.200:50447] AH00035: access to / denied (filesystem path '/mnt/html') because search permissions are missing on a component of the path

I used chgrp to set the permissions on /mnt and /mnt/html and that didn’t help me at all, I was still receiving the same message.

I even tried setting to a global 777 across the board for apache (this is a non-production server) and still no positive result.

The issue in the end was SELinux preventing access outside of it’s defined default scope for Apache.

Running this fixed my issue:

chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /mnt

This could be applied to other directory roots outside of the default /var/www as well.