Sorry if this has been answered already, I've searched everywhere without finding anything specific to my question. New to Fedora 9 and Linux in general. I am looking for advice regarding my storage drives. I have a 40GB drive containing my Fedora partitions and have added 2 500GB drives for storage/backup, at least 1 of which I would like to make available via http for convenience, for access from any location. At this point I think I would like to leave the 2 drives as separate, instead of RAID.

What is the most sensible way to go about this, for security and simplicity?

Mount the file to /mnt/foldername and link to my webroot?

Mount the drives directly to my webroot? (I seem to recall errors when attempting to mount to webroot on my first install, but maybe unrelated).

Am I even on the right track or missing something fundamental?

Any help appreciated, thanks in advance.

HTTP does not provide a lot of help for backup or mass storage oriented applications. Can you be more specific about how you want to use HTTP in this genre?
--- rod.

I would like to:
1. Create a centralized storage/backup for my local network (including Windows machines), perhaps with Samba.
2. Make files available for download to family/friends via http. Also provide file access and streaming media service for when I am away from the local network, from machines/networks that do not necessarily have SSH/SFTP or other non standard ports availalble.

Looking into this a bit more perhaps the best option is to store the Files under a secondary user account in /home and sym-linking from the webroot. Am I correct in assuming that this provides additional security benefits over the above mentioned methods? I would think that any security breach would likely be limited to the user account and/or drive B in the following configuration (drive A= fedora partitions, B= Storage with http access, and C = manual redundant copy of drive B).

Thanks again

It sounds like you are on the right track. If you have Linux accounts per user of the Samba mounted Windows host, you can have users share files via HTTP by storing them in the respective user's ~/public_html directory on the file/web server. That simplifies setup of the web server, and relieves users from having to use Linux logins to publish files.
Using Samba to provide shared mass storage is a standard configuration. It is up to you to decide how the storage is allocated based on your requirements. Most such installations I have seen provide some blend of user-specific storage (ie /home/user/...) and a common/shared access directory structure. My preference is to limit the use of links in a filesystem, as they can become a maintenance headache.
--- rod.