title: Allow Apache/PHP a read/write access to a mounted directory
body: <p>We have websites running on a linux server with apache httpd and php. On that server a certain directory from a windows server is mounted as let's say <code>/mnt/some_directory/</code>. I can browse this directory with both WinSCP or SSH, using my own user account.</p>
  
  <p>I can also perform the following in SSH:</p>
  
  <pre><code>php -r "print_r(file_get_contents('/mnt/some_directory/file_name.txt'));"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and see contents of that file.</p>
  
  <p>We need to read a file and parse from that directory in order to import it in the database that is used by the website. But when an fopen or a file_get_contents on the website we get a permission denied error.</p>
  
  <p>I have limited access to the web server (and limited knowledge of *nix and apache configuration), but the administrator that is supposed to resolve this apparently is also lacking this knowledge and I need to have this task resolved,that's why I am asking here.</p>
  
  <p>What the admin did was to set the group and ownership of the mounted directory to"apache", which is the user the httpd process is running as. But that didn't help.</p>
  
  <p>As far as I know access to files outside of the webroot is disallowed by default. Would it be sufficient to set a DIRECTORY directive in httpd.conf for <code>/mnt/some_directory/</code>? Or is there anything else that has to be done?</p>