I manage a website on a webserver running Ubuntu.

As of this morning, whenever anyone (from within our network or outside) tries to view the page, a dialog appears demanding a username of password. It requires someone with access "level_15" or "view_access". (I wanted to upload an image here to show you it but the website won't let me yet)

A few hours spent searching has led me to a few conclusions:

1. This is not an issue with permissions on my server. When I checked with

   $ ls -l

the main index page's permission seemed to me ok (it allows access to anonymous to read):

-rw-rwx-r--

2. It seems to be a cisco problem. Most issues with this concern accessing the router itself to configure it. We have a cisco router, but I don't pretend to know very much about it.

Does someone know anything about this? Any help at all would be marvellous.

1 Answer

Your Cisco guess is right. In front of your website is a Cisco router, which can run an internal webserver for management purposes.

The public IP address for your website is most likely terminated on this router, which then nats it to its internal address.

It would appear that someone has enabled the management webserver on the Cisco box on the interface facing the internet. This means the router itself responds to the http requests for your site rather than forwarding them on to the web server.

If you disable this, then your site should return to normal:

 conf t no ip http server

(these commands are executed on the Cisco router itself. I would suggest getting whomever manages the router to do it).

2

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