Permission denied while opening a file.

Question

Hi,
I have a program, in which I am trying to open local system file.
When I give the link as http://www.googlestepper.blogspot.com , it actually connects and opens the URL; whereas and when I give the link as file:///d:/test.txt, it does not open and says 'Permission denied' from a message box.
More in detail:
The flow is between JS, PHP and a text file (text file contains two columns; the first is like name and the second is like value where the value is a link: http or file... name-value pair). When user types the name in a text box and presses 'Enter' key, it locates the appropriate value (here link: http or file) from the text file and opens the link. Link opens for http only, but not for file:///, it says 'Permission denied'. I am using Apache.
Please help me in solving the problem.
Thanks and regards,
Leslie Prabakar Ruphas V

Answer 1

I'll call you Ralph,
There is a strange a little rule in webservers that says "thou shalt not allow access to the file system!"... It's a security thing... It means that no matter what a hacker does within your server s/he shouldn't have permits to see anything outside of that webserver... so compromised doesn't mean pants-down-hello-world.
You can't turn it off, and if you could then you really wouldn't want to, and if you figure out how to turn it off flick me your IP address and I'll empty your bank accounts for you. Point taken?
So what do you do instead? Publish your html page in or under your tomcat's webapps folder, and access it's via it's url.