networked web sources

[illdill]

How do I get apache specifically (Linux) to see a networked drive and serve websites from that drive?

Thanks

[Roxoff]

You need to mount the partition on the local machine, and the process to do that depends on the machine which is providing the networked drive.

I assume that because you mention 'network drive' you're accessing web pages on a windows host from your apache server.

Use smbmount to mount the server's web pages to the file system, then you can either put a symlink (ln -s ...) in your apache pages directory to the mount point in the file system, or you could set up a virtual host to point straight at the pages you've mounted.

[kkubasik]

Actualy, smbmount is becoming slighly obsolete, if you have Windows XP SP2 or the latest Windows Server (2003 and up) you will need the mount.cifs tool. Because the latest releases of Windows want to digitaly sign all transfers via smb, and the stable release of samba doesn't support that, you must use MS's open implementation of the samba protocol (which, according to MS, is to be phased out and transparently replaced with the Common Internet File System (cifs)).

basicaly

mount.cifs //windowsMachine/webshare /mnt/windows -o user=qub333

But a word of warning, if you are serving any type of dynamic pages, or multimedia (beyond simple pictures) you are going to run into major performance bottlenecks. And even just having a separate CSS stylesheet will result in a slower page load time.

but there are some apache mods to cache static content in memory, perhaps one of those can help...

[illdill]

Hi there, and thanks for your response. I should have been more clear. What I have is an NDAS netdisk connected via an IP address to the local area network. How can I map this on a linux machine and choose a folder on this drive in the VirtualHost container DocumentRoot directive.

Thanks again!