Apache2 & Javascript: Unfortunate global redirect in a .conf file

The following issue applies at least to Ubuntu 12.04, and does NOT apply to Ubuntu 10.04.

It took me about 30 minutes of trying to find an error in "Flyspray", while the problem was somewhere totally else:

I noticed that the LOGIN button doesn't work, which was apparently supposed to open a javascript based "lightbox" with login fields. After digging through logs, I found that it was trying to load JS files from /usr/share/javascript/... while those files are actually located under the Flyspray directory.

Then I found that in /etc/apache2/conf.d, a softlink exists to the file /etc/javascript/javascript-common.conf. In there, some intelligent package designer put the directive

Alias /javascript /usr/share/javascript/

WTF.

Result: Flyspray cannot access its javascript files anymore, which are located in /javascript of the flyspray installation. That path gets redirected away though by that intelligent .conf file up there, resulting in pretty 404 errors - only in the logs though, not on-screen.

Not sure what exactly Virtualmin can do about this... Maybe disable that intelligent .conf up there upon installation. :) Not classifying this as a bug of course, since it's not VM's fault.

I checked my 10.04 installations, which do NOT have that softlink in Apache's conf.d, nor the /etc/javascript directory.

I guess I'll be staying with 10.04 for my production VMs for quite a while. :D The disastrous security flaw in MySQL a while back, and now this, do not really improve my confidence in this new version.

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Howdy -- thanks for your report!

So just to clarify -- are you saying that if you comment out this line from the .conf file in "/etc/apache2/conf.d/":

Alias /javascript /usr/share/javascript/

That it all works correctly? So the solution could just be to make sure that line is commented out?

Yep Eric, that's right. Commenting out the Alias fixes the issue. As would removing the mentioned softlink in /etc/apache2/conf.d

I don't have that softlink nor the file /etc/javascript/javascript-common.conf on my ubuntu 12.04 installation.

Maybe you could try to find the package that contains that file?

I did some testing, and I wasn't able to reproduce that problem by installing flyspray on Ubuntu 12.04.

It appears that the files your seeing are part of the javascript-common package... that doesn't appear to be a dependency of flyspray.

Is it possible that package was installed outside of Virtualmin?

That is quite possible, yeah. I do have some other stuff installed on that testing VM, e.g. Zabbix, for which I needed a number of packages to compile it.

I will check which package contains that stuff shortly.

Oh, also, please dont get me wrong with my sarcasm in the first post. I was not trying to insinuate that you VM developers are the culprits! :-)