Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /path/httpdocs/news.html There are a few reasons that can cause this message and this is for people who have ruled out the basics, eg. your symlinks are enabled and the right permissions are applied (but read on to learn about ownership requirements above the directory in question). So there are a few key things here that cause Apache not to follow symlinks:........

There is a nice mode that Samba supports which you can add to smb.conf create mode=555 This way users can create and write files/directories without deleting (except I believe dirs can be deleted but only if there are no files inside). It's too bad that Linux does not have built-in "write"/"delete" privileges and is something that even Windows 98 can trump.........