So yeah, I have this web server running up at home, and apart from being a webserver, its also an FTP dump, torrent box (utorrent webgui baby yeah!) and a place for my noobass sister to watch some bad music vids on the Jootubes.

What I want to do is bind some network locations, local and distant on LAN (torrents on the same box, files on my external shared by samba) so that they all figure in my htdocs folder, hence all available on the internetz. Usually, on linux,to bind something like my external hard drive i would just do something like bind \\wifighter\radium /var/www/radium but obviously windows just doesn't support binding stuff like that. Without messing around with Apache virtualhosts and subdomains, which I understand nothing to,how can I make this work?

Now the second part, securing the whole thing. Although I don't care about people stealing my homework, I don't want people to be able to download my torrents directly from my box at extremely high http speeds. Of course, I could put a .htaccess file in the root folder, but to my knowledge, htaccess stuff isnt recursive, so it wont protect the child folders.
I dont want that to happen. Any other way of securing htdocs folder?

Bumpedy bumber bumb McBumper Bumpist.

I suggest going through an apache tutorial. To learn about the software you are running. Really the only way to be secure is to understand how your app works, and interacts with other systems.

So explain again why you are running a service on Windows that will be shared to the outside world?

Seriously, you are trying to lock down a server that will be hosted on an unsecurable OS. If you have a box running Linux & Samba, why don't you just host the site there?

The box that runs linux serves many many other purpose, plus it has very limited disk space, so I prefer to run it upstairs on something more powerful and only very sparsely used. If my sister weren't on there and if she and my parents wanted me to install FC on there, it would be, but last time I tried to move her to linux she complained that she couldn't have webcams on GAIM. I told her to get a life and ditch webcams, but i got counternailed by my parents which forced it back to windows.

Then give her the POS system & use the good one for yourself. Put Windows back on the older system, & put all the Linux/Apache installs onto the better system.

Well in the end, I daemonifying everything that I needed running, including a torrent client that lives of apache (Torrentflux, hotstuff), and switching to Fedora Core 5, since my stupid Laggboxx doesnt have a DVD player. The sister has Opera for the Jootubes, Pidgin and frets on fire to play with, and she's really happy cause she thinks she's the only one using linux around (which is kinda true.)

I can now resume to my usual binds and .htaccess and stuff while I read a bit more about virtual hosts and more advanced apache configuration.

Oh yeah, and for the record, turns out that .htaccess is recursive.