Symphony.

Hi guys,

I was just going over our logs (as you do) and noticed a single instance of an error I wasn't expecting:

Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: [redacted]/YaBB.pl

Our rewrites seem to be working fine - so not sure what the issue could be (and there's no manifestation of the problem that I've seen, i.e. it's an error with no consequences).

I also have no idea what YaBB.pl is.

Any ideas?

Looks like a fairly common intrusion attempt. YaBB had some vulnerability issues so attackers are checking if it's present to exploit your server.

Oh my.

Will investigate further - so likely nothing wrong with rewrites I assume?

Nope, you should be good, especially if everything is working :)

Symphony doesn't really create and use any symlinked directories by default, so it's safe to remove that directive.

It's only really useful if you're remapping directories around. For example, you could have two virtual hosts running on a single server, but only one instance of the Symphony core that is symlinked by the two virtual hosts. This way if you update one instance of Symphony, both hosts would be updated. You could even put this Symphony core directory outside of your public www directory to make it a little more secure.

There are many other uses of symlinks such as pointing directories to NFS mounts, etc.

Thanks for the extra info Allen!