FollowSymLinks error "Not allowed here"

Question

I've been searching for 4 hours already but I can't seem to find a solution to our problem.

The problem we've encountered
We have a CentOS Linux 6.4 server, running Virtualmin 3.99.gpl. We have a Drupal website which we would like to move to this server, and as it's a multidomain site, we will have to use FollowSymLinks. This has (as I was told) been disabled as some security flaws were discovered addressing this directive. Since then you would have to use SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. Now, Drupal has a lot of .htaccess files hidden deep in the roots of this system, and as I'm not sure how this new method will be supported, I wanted to ask some experts their opinion to the solution my colleague proposed.

The Proposed solution
My colleague told me that it would probably work if I'd wrote a simple shell script to edit all the .htaccess files in the root folder of the domain, which would replace all the FollowSymlinks with the SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. As I'm not sure if this would fix this problem, I would like to ask your opinion on this.

What we've tried
We've tried to fix the configuration file from Apache to allow FollowSymLinks, but this did not work. Also we tried changing the global configuration in Webmin, but webmin ignored these edits (a fix for this would be great!). Deleting the line of the .htaccess in the root folder, fixes the problem, but this is not the solution we want to use.

Any other solutions, fixes or workarounds?

Answer 1

Just to come back at this, the proposed solution 'just works' in my case.