I use a number of ‘open’ directories on my server for years, but I switched servers and updated Plesk to version 11.

Suddenly my open directories where not open anymore and no content was visible. In my error.log I find this error:

Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/index.pl

I searched the internet and I could not find a good solution other than that I had to change my dir.conf where is stated: DirectoryIndex at_domains_index.html index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm index.shtml index.cfm

I even changed my vhost configuration what did not work either, it might helped finding the solution, so I will check if my changed vhost.conf is necessary.

in the end: changing dir.conf with the line about the indexes was the solution. I had to remove to remove at least the perl (.pl) one.

I now have:

DirectoryIndex at_domains_index.html index.php index.html index.htm

restarted apache with: service apache2 restart and issue was resolved