Symbolic link network volume

Question

Is it possible to create a symbolic link to a network volume? I have a lot of content stored on a machine that I would like to serve up with apache from another. Basically I want http://mysite.com/ to read HTML files from the machine with apache installed, and http://mysite.com/content/ to pull content from my other machine.

Answer 1

You'll want to use mod_proxy in ProxyPass mode. The short version is:

ProxyPass /content http://some-other-site/content
ProxyPassReverse /content http://some-other-site/content

That's assuming that your other machine is running HTTPd. If not, you'll need something like NFS or Samba to make the contents available to your server that runs mysite.com.

Answer 2

Not sure what you mean by 'symlink to network volume'. The symbolic link really needs to go to a mounted volume. And if the volume is mounted, you don't really need the symlink, you can use the Alias directive.

(all paths made up)

Say you have your (other machine) content mounted at /mnt/content. Yes, you can symlink /var/www/html/content to /mnt/content, but you can also do Alias /content/ /var/www/content/ in your httpd.conf.

So the answer is yes, you can do this, but there are probably other ways to do this too.