I think I was having hardware problems. The ethernet connection was intermittent and there was a lot of disc noise. I decided to start again with a new hdd and a quick re-tinning of the ethernet socket and adjacent SM chips on the MB. I then installed Lubuntu to an empty disc, then installed samba and apache2 after an update and upgrade. All is now working except:

I wanted to follow what I thought was the convention that, as I download new rides (usually on my W10 PC), I would write them to a Fulgaz folder in my home folder on the laptop. (That's where the samba share was set up and working).


I tried renaming the var/www/html folder to html.old and pointed a new html shortcut/folder to my home/fulgaz folder (which has all the ride mp4s in it). Should have worked to my mind - it didn't. I got 403 Forbidden on both machine browsers. I changed ownership and group of the html link folder back and forth from user to root, but it made no difference.

Does Apache not like links? What the rule here?