Unless I've misunderstood, the problem you have is that your soft-link is underneath the web-root directory.

The logs need to be accessible to the user that your web-server runs under, but that doesn't mean that they need to live inside your web-environment.

Here's an example script that I run on an intranet to allow me to view some log files - note that I cannot browse to these file directly from my browser.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);

my @logs = qw(/var/log/httpd/error_log /var/log/httpd/access_log /var/
+log/mysqld.log);
my $log = $logs[0];
$log = $logs[param('log')] if param('log') =~ /1|2/;

print header();
print start_html(-title=>$log);
print '<pre>';
open(LOG, $log)||warn "cannot open $log: $!\n";
print while(<LOG>);
print '</pre>';
print end_html();
[download]

Note that I cannot just paste "/var/log/httpd/error_log" into my browser and expect it to return anything...

map{$a=1-$_/10;map{$d=$a;$e=$b=$_/20-2;map{($d,$e)=(2*$d*$e+$a,$e**2
-$d**2+$b);$c=$d**2+$e**2>4?$d=8:_}1..50;print$c}0..59;print$/}0..20
[download]