Ubuntu – accessing /cgi-bin/ throws 403 forbidden

I recently struggled with the same problem on my Fedora 10 system. In my case the culprit was some odd redirection that I was doing in Apache. Specifically, I use a content management system (Drupal, to be exact) that within it's .htaccess includes the following redirection logic to redirect missing files to a PHP script:

# Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

It makes sense that the above only affects the PUT method since in that case REQUEST_FILENAME does not exist.

Not having the WebDAV area inside of the Drupal area, which seems like a reasonable constraint, fixes the problem.

Also, I think it is likely that SELinux would result in a different error, but it's not mentioned in the discussion above. Did you try disabling SELinux?

NameVirtualHost myiphere

NEVER use hostnames for vhosts; use the following (default) instead: NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost myiphere>

Same goes here.

<Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
</Directory>

This does not belong inside a vhost; you set this ONCE, in the main server config.

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

Don't alter CGI options inside a scriptalias; this is all done for you.

Start with the following corrected setup, and remember that without the ServerName, NOTHING works.

<Directory />
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride None
</Directory>

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>

  ServerName test.local

  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www2/

  <Directory /var/www2/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
  </Directory>

  ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
  <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
  LogLevel warn
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
  ServerSignature On

</VirtualHost>