Amazon S3 Buckets and “Access Denied”

DreamBank uses Amazon S3 as it’s data and media storage backup. Recently I enabled logging on our S3 buckets and was immediately refused access to any of the content contained within; nothing but “403 Access Denied” errors. Bit of a problem, that.

Thanks to some sound guidance from the folks at Cloudberry Lab (who make CloudBerry S3 Explorer – that’s my plug for their freeware Windows S3 app since they were so helpful) I now have full access to our buckets again.

The solution: turns out the permissions on the buckets were munged* when I enabled logging, giving access to no one. Resetting the access to “owner/owner” did the trick. This was accomplished by connecting to S3 through Transmit and tweaking the perms like any other file directory.

(*that’s as close to a technical description as I can get. I have no idea what really went wrong.)