I had the weirdest problem the other day so I thought I’d write it down! I uploaded a toy script for someone, but it had images in it and they wouldn’t load. The image files existed, and I could request everything around them, files in other subdirectories were okay; the same files in other subdirectories also served correctly. Yet in my error logs I just had lots of:

File does not exist: /usr/share/apache2/icons/ ...

Which was really odd, because my webroot is somewhere else completely!

Eventually I spotted a /icons entry in the configuration for mod_alias in apache, which intercepts all requests to /icons on any virtual host, and rewrites it. Err, thanks? Renaming the directory to “images” solved the problem in this instance, and I hope if you googled for an error message, you will find this page and be able to fix it equally quickly :)