I decided to change from no control panel to cPanel (to require less Linux experience from staff) and now I have an issue.

It may not be a cPanel issue and I may have just overlooked something but here goes anyway.

I have a server with several thousand accounts on it. The only thing in the accounts is, the clients mail and their images, all the files for their site are in a global folder that all sites use. I use an .htaccess file when generating the account to set the client id to pull the site data from the database.

1) Security is not really a concern as the clients don't get to log into the server. Only webmail. All uploads are done via a client portal script.
2) htaccess looks like:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
SetEnv client_id 97
RewriteBase /~systemfi/
RewriteRule ^(.*) client_files/$1

Its the RewriteBase /~systemfi/ thats the problem. I am getting the following error in apache error_log:

[Thu Nov 26 23:51:02 2009] [error] [client] client denied by server configuration: /home/vandsfre/public_html/.htaccess

As far as I know, I have allowed users to read outside of their webroot.

As I said, this works on my non cpanel server.

Any insight would be great.

Thanks.