Hosting over a network share permalinks

Hello,

This one is proving to be a tough egg to crack, and I can’t post to the advanced forum so maybe someone here can help. I’m hosting wordpress between two computers, one running linux that takes care of the front end, database, scripting, apache, etc and another running windows that actually stores all my files and shares them with the linux machine VIA a windows share and smbfs. The reason for this admittedly over-complicated setup is I need quite a bit of space (7TB) and the RAID array to do this only works on the machine running windows, and I can’t uninstall windows or move the RAID array. So I have mounted the RAID array from a windows machine using smbfs on to the linux machine and then symlinked the mountpoint of the share to /var/www where apache looks.

( side note to justify this insanity – I used to host directly from the windows machine but server administration was a nightmare, and I like working in linux way better, so this setup made the most sense. )

I have everything working the way I want except for this issue with the permalinks. Basically, my website works fine (stonelinks.org), however after enabling pretty permalinks (like it currently is), when you click on any link to a virtual directory it says that I am forbidden. The actual error that appears in the log is this:

[Wed Dec 08 15:17:45 2010] [error] [client 66.249.65.250] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www

I have mod_rewrite enabled, but I can’t even tell if my .htaccess files are working. My configuration files look like this:

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

<VirtualHost *:80>
        DocumentRoot /var/www

        <Directory /var/www>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

        LogLevel warn

        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

in case this is a permissions thing here is /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=f8fa3eb0-5f5e-4652-b5c4-4dcf7489f2cf /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=74efcd33-a45d-4a0f-b8d7-16c88755a0aa none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
//stonelinks.ath.cx/F  /media/stonelinks  smbfs  dir_mode=0775,gid=1002,credentials=/etc/auto.cifs.stonelinks,  0  0

where stonelinks.ath.cx is the windows server with the share called f
/etc/auto.cifs.stonelinks is my login info for the windows computer
group 1002 is a group I made called developers:

root@dildozer:~# grep developers /etc/group
developers:x:1002:luke,www-data,root
root@dildozer:~# members --all developers
luke www-data root

I suspect this is a permissions thing, but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. I’ve even tried changing everything to 777 permissions (which I know is dangerous, but I want to see it work before I batten down the hatches), both from the mountpoint of the share and from /var/www. Interestingly I can’t change the permissions for /var/www if the remote filesystem is mounted.

So I’m throughly stumped. If there is any more info I can provide please let me know and thank you for all your help! You people are saints for what you do here.