[plug] mod_rewrite: Out of chickens! (OT)

[James Devenish]

Okay, I'm still not sure if this actually qualifies as a description of
an observed symptom without further qualification as to where these
words are coming from:
	"Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies
	that RewriteRule directive is forbidden"
Trevor, are you saying that this is an error message that is given by
Apache? And what version of Apache are you running? Apache 1 or 2?
A recent Apache 1? Why leads you to suspect anything to do with the
FollowSymLinks and SymLinksIfOwnerMatch options?

> I understand what it's doing: Because the scope of the rewrite engine
> also covers the cgi-bin dir, it's balking at accessing anything in
> cgi-bin, because for that dir I have neither Options FollowSymLinks
> nor SymLinksIfOwnerMatch - which is a sensible thing to have for a
> cgi-bin.

Right...those generic terms like "it", "balk" aren't helping.
Are you saying:

 - when you have the RewriteRule active, Apache returns 403 (forbidden)
   when you attempt to access URLs in /cgi-bin/...
 - when you have the RewriteRule active, Apache returns 500 (internal
   server error) and leaves a message in its log saying that RewriteRule
   is forbidden?
 - when you have the RewriteRule active, Apache return the bare contents
   of the files in /cgi-bin/
 - when you have the RewriteRule active, Apache redirects you to
   somewhere outside of /cgi-bin/ when you try to access /cgi-bin/
 - when you have the RewriteRule active, Apache dies and leaves a
   message in its error log?

We could attempt to recreate your situation but would have to do
this by guesswork since I haven't seen the context within your
Apache configuration. How are you designating the cgi-bin directory
as a script directory? The only thing that comes to mind is whether
you are SURE you want the rewrite rules to be inside a Directory
block? The rewriting is about URLs, not files, after all.