Apache AH00035 error until I log in via SSH

Question

I'm having a problem configuring Apache (2.4.7) on Ubuntu (14.04.1 - fully patched as of an hour ago) with the userdir mod. I keep getting the following error when attempting to access my userdir (eg: https://server.tld/~kjp/)

[client 10.2.10.105:57727] AH00035: access to /~kjp/ denied (filesystem path '/home/kjp/public_html') because search permissions are missing on a component of the path

Here's the weird part: these errors stop happening when I log into the server via SSH (same user).

I know the AH00035 error has to do with file permissions, so here's my set-up:

kjp@server:~/public_html$ ls -alF
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 2 kjp www-data 4096 Jan 16 13:02 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 kjp kjp      4096 Jan 18 23:46 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 kjp www-data  177 Jan 16 13:48 .htaccess
-rw-r--r-- 1 kjp www-data 5340 Jan 17 22:14 index.html

I've tried setting them to 777 but
1) it's a bad idea, and
2) it doesn't work anyways.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It turns out I had enabled ecryptfs when installing Ubuntu. This meant that until I logged in, the userdir was encrypted and inaccessible to the www-data user.

After disabling ecryptfs, everything worked perfectly. I was even able to reset the group ownership of my directories / files to my own user.