For my own sanity I'm blogging this, since every time I have to do it I end up jumping through the same hoops and cursing myself for not blogging it!

I have a USB external drive on one of my machines. I want it shared across the network. It's an old Windows drive formatted as NTFS. Here are the steps:

1. On the "server" install required services and applications. As root:

FUSE should be there already, but just in case. The GUI for ntfs-3g is optional.

2. Make sure the NFS services is enabled and loads on boot:

This is more a bookmark for my reference than anything, but if you have a stock CentOS 5.x installation (maybe from a VPS image or a clean install on a dedicated box) you're going to have issues with Drupal 6.x.

It comes down to PHP version. It ships with PHP 5.1.6 and Drupal these days pretty much depends on PHP 5.2.x upwards to work. Utilities like Drush do too, so leaving PHP as it is, you'll find, is not really an option. To confirm you will have this problem, execute this command to check your PHP version: