Danne Lundqvist has a helpful hint for anyone looking to set up a development environment (he did it on his local machine, but it'd apply for remote setups too) with Apache 2.2.6.
I downloaded Apache 2.2.6, PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.45. I compiled and installed them and finally added a few virtual hosts. None of the vhosts worked. They all gave me [an error]. I had missed that apache now ships with a slightly different configuration for the / directory
He includes the fix for this, what he thinks is a better way to handle it - setting the Directory value to only the directory Apache needs to allow.