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My job has had a pretty primitive method for developing websites. Everyone uses Dreamweaver (even the developers) because we keep a copy on the fileserver and need to run the files on the production webserver.

You heard that right. We develop sites on our 'live,' production servers.

So I had an idea: If I could set up my local copy of Apache to access the SMB share on our fileserver and MySQL setup to mirror the production database, I could develop the site locally and then upload when everything works.

So I find a tutorial to tell me how to modify my Apache config and hosts files to create a development site. I point the DocumentRoot to the site's folder on the SMB share and restart Apache. I try to run the site and I get a 403 (permission denied) error. I ls -l the mounted directory and they're all rwx------ (permissions code 700). I try to chmod ./* 755 the mounted shares but, even thought it doesn't throw an error message, it doesn't change the permissions.

I think this has to do with the way SMB mounts the shares. However, the fileserver is running an older version of Red Hat and supports NFS. If I get the admin to turn on NFS, will mounting the NFS drive work? Our admin does a lot of development work and hates Dreamweaver.

Any suggestions on how to turn NFS on for a Red Hat server would be welcome.