Using a mac shared drive

[bgradid]

I want to set up an apache server for a friend, but, using his mac's hard drive over the network (using OSX) would be great, so the documents would be symlinked from it, over to the webfolder of the linux server, saving a lot of hard drive space and trouble for him copying things over an FTP.
Would such a thing be possible? Would it require samba?
Thanks.

[m00dawg]

If he is using OS X, you can use nfs or samba to accomplish this. In your case, if you want to mount his drive to your linux box, you will need to figure out smbmount which I have never used (I usually go the other way - from a Linux box to my iBook).

nfs is probably your best bet if he is using a desktop, since nfs works great but isn't as user friendly as samba is on OS X (and is thus a small pain on a laptop). Basically, as far as I can tell, you setup nfs in OS X the same way you do in Linux (with an exports file and specifically mounting the remote fielsystem). I haven't had the need to fully setup any NFS stuff on my iBook, however, so this is just a small guess; but I know it works (you may just need fink or something of that sort to setup an actual server, but I think it has client support).

If you have space on the Linux box, it may be better to put the files needed by the webserver there isntead of serving it from the Mac. This is because you don't want to increase the amount of network traffic, by having to grab the file off of a file-share and then send it to someone else on the network. I would also consider Linux to be more rock-solid at sharing files, and as I hinted to above, using Samba to mount shares from Linux seems easier than the other way around. And if you wanted to use nfs, you don't have to figure out how to setup an nfs server on the Mac (it may only come with a client).
_________________
www.moocowproductions.org

[bgradid]

Thanks, that reply was exactly what I needed. I figured it'd increase network traffic a lot, but it's a small home network, and a very private home web server. I'm glad NFS is a possible option under OSX.

Cheers!