I hate to ask a question as broad as this, but I'm not really sure where to start. I have a low-traffic server that was running Windows 2000 Server (which really started to be horrible) that I just switched over to Mandrake. Basically, I want to set up my website to be just like it was before. I updated the html files to be shtml, and I used Netconf to set things up as far as I could from there. The page loads fine, however I have a major issue with links. Under IIS, I simply had links that pointed to a virtual directory, such as "uploads" and they would just return a raw directory listing. I can't seem to get that to work in Apache. I have tried both sym-linking to directories outside of my home html directory, and also simply creating directories inside the html directory. Is this even possible under Apache? I'm guessing yes, but I can't see how. Also, I tried setting my home html directory to a different directory but it would not work right. I would get a 403 error (forbidden) when I tried to load the page. I can see this has something to do with setting file permissions, but I'm not exactly sure what they should be set to or how to do that properly. I would greatly appreciate any help. (I don't want to be forced back to windows! no!)

In particular, you need something like this in your Apache configuration (and inside your VirtualHosts declaration if you use it):

<Location />
Options Indexes
IndexOptions +ScanHTMLTitles -IconsAreLinks +FancyIndexing
AllowOverride None
order deny,allow
allow from all
</Location>

What this particular configuration block does is for the web site root (and any directories under it):

- auto-creates an index if there is no index.(html|htm|pl|cgi|php, etc.)
- turns on fancy indexing and HTML title scanning (makes listings prettier)
- disables any .htaccess files
- sets up basic access rights (everyone can access)

Apache has VERY good documentation on their website. (http://www.apache.org) -- I highly reccomend you pull up a chair and do some reading, I learned a lot there.