I have Apache 2.4 installed on Debian 9.9, basically doing nothing but serving an instance of Roundcube (currently 1.4 RC-1).
The document root of Apache is /home/web
(because reasons), and the Roundcube instance is installed in /home/web/mail
.
The Apache user (www-data
) has full read/write access to the entire /home/web
directory tree.
The document root has an index file that redirects to www.mydomain.co.uk/mail
and I'm using mod_rewrite
to change any HTTP requests to HTTPS.
Today I noticed (and don't know how long it's been happening) that when I hit mydomain.co.uk
it logs a 401 error in Apache:
192.168.10.79 - - [09/Jun/2019:18:49:59 +0100] "GET /mail/ HTTP/1.1" 401 2955 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:67.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0"
This is particularly a problem when accessing it externally as it's triggering a fail2ban rule and banning my clients.
The 401 error means "authentication failed" but I have not set up any authentication on this directory with Apache which AIUI requires the presence of a .htpasswd
file - I've checked for the existence of this file in my Apache document root, and there is none - or the use of an auth clause in the virtualhost file - of which also there is none.
How can I find the cause, and prevent, this 401 error?
Some debug information from Fiddler:
GET https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail/ HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, image/jxr, */*
Accept-Language: en-GB
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: www.mydomain.co.uk
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: roundcube_sessid=sadh0s1j2rn769rvebhpsv6m81
HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 08:27:28 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;
Expires: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 08:27:28 GMT
Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate
Pragma: private
Last-Modified: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 08:27:28 GMT
X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge
X-Frame-Options: sameorigin
Content-Language: en
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 5435
If I look in Fiddler under the "Auth" tab:
No Proxy-Authenticate Header is present.
No WWW-Authenticate Header is present.
Some further debug information from wget:
DEBUG output created by Wget 1.18 on linux-gnueabi.
Reading HSTS entries from /home/darren/.wget-hsts
URI encoding = ‘UTF-8’
Converted file name 'mail' (UTF-8) -> 'mail' (UTF-8)
--2019-06-10 13:34:43-- https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail
Certificates loaded: 151
Resolving www.mydomain.co.uk (www.mydomain.co.uk)... XX.XX.XX.XX
Caching www.mydomain.co.uk => XX.XX.XX.XX
Connecting to www.mydomain.co.uk (www.mydomain.co.uk)|XX.XX.XX.XX|:443... connected.
Created socket 3.
Releasing 0x004bf2e0 (new refcount 1).
---request begin---
GET /mail HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Wget/1.18 (linux-gnueabi)
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity
Host: www.mydomain.co.uk
Connection: Keep-Alive
---request end---
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
---response begin---
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 12:34:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;
Location: https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail/
Content-Length: 331
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
---response end---
301 Moved Permanently
Registered socket 3 for persistent reuse.
Parsed Strict-Transport-Security max-age = 63072000, includeSubDomains = true
Added new HSTS host: www.mydomain.co.uk:443 (max-age: 63072000, includeSubdomains: true)
URI content encoding = ‘iso-8859-1’
Location: https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail/ [following]
Skipping 331 bytes of body: [<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a hreSkipping 157 bytes of body: [f="https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.25 (Debian) Server at www.mydomain.co.uk Port 443</address>
</body></html>
] done.
URI content encoding = None
Converted file name 'mail' (UTF-8) -> 'mail' (UTF-8)
--2019-06-10 13:34:43-- https://www.mydomain.co.uk/mail/
Reusing existing connection to www.mydomain.co.uk:443.
Reusing fd 3.
---request begin---
GET /mail/ HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Wget/1.18 (linux-gnueabi)
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity
Host: www.mydomain.co.uk
Connection: Keep-Alive
---request end---
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
---response begin---
HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 12:34:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;
Set-Cookie: roundcube_sessid=9dd09n33d6k3f1kil69f90bkk6; path=/; secure; HttpOnly
Expires: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 12:34:43 GMT
Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 12:34:43 GMT
X-Frame-Options: sameorigin
Content-Language: en
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
---response end---
401 Unauthorized
Stored cookie www.mydomain.co.uk -1 (ANY) / <session> <secure> [expiry none] roundcube_sessid 9dd09n33d6k3f1kil69f90bkk6
Disabling further reuse of socket 3.
Username/Password Authentication Failed.
Saving HSTS entries to /home/darren/.wget-hsts