I am looking to upgrade machines from ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04.  We use
mpm-itk to isolate sites by permissions.  This worked fine in 12.04 but in
14.04 we are now seeing the error 'pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess
file' returning a 403 when trying to access any sites.

The document root directories are chmod 700 to prevent outside access to
them.  If I chmod 755 the sites work.  They also work if I change the
ownership to the www-data user.  I pulled the latest 2.4.7 module from the
archive link but this didn't seem to fix it.

Any ideas?