I encountered a weird web problem today when adding images to the company website. The new images I’d added wouldn’t appear on their page, and when pointing the browser directly at them, I received a 403 Forbidden error.

After insuring that the permissions and filenames were all correct, I sat down with the sysadmin to see if a second pair of eyes and a root login could find anything amiss. After spending half an hour of finding nothing in the logfile or permissions settings, we both gave up.

I returned to my desk, and on a whim, performed the following commands:

1. cp image-file.gif foo.gif
2. rm image-file.gif
3. mv foo.gif image-file.gif

I can’t imagine why this would have solved the problem, but it did. The implications — that something might be messed up deep within the innards of Apache or the Fedora filesystem — make me worry what other bizarre behavior I can expect from the webserver in the future.

This isn’t the first time machines have had odd behavior in my presence, which I’ve been able to dispel by performing seemingly unrelated actions. I’m obviously in the wrong business. I should pack my bags and hit the road as a traveling computer faith healer.

Originally published at nyerm. You can comment here or there.