I have a two part question regarding setting up JMS on my server.

First part of the question:

I've installed on a fresh Joomla 1.5.15 installation, nothing added except JMS.
I'm on a hosted server, but this is the only thing in this account's folders. I've used this company for 7 years for Joomla hosting, so I know they are compatible with Joomla.

My JMS settings tab says:

Unix Symbolic Links: Forbidden
MySQL Version: 5.0.45-community Sharing supported

My phpinfo:() gives this regarding open_basedir:

open_basedir no value no value

When I try to set up a slave site, using the symlinks function, I get errors creating symbolic links, I suppose it is due to this setting of Forbidden for Unix Symbolic links.

Is this consistent and how can I change this?

Second part of the question:

Do I need to change this to use JMS? Do I need Symlinks at all?

Here is what I am trying to set up for this client:

Long Term Care Benefits Agency owns the site. They have multiple companies that provide different insurance products for them.
They want to have individual sites that all use the same content, or share some of the same content, but that have different themes / templates for each company's site.

So with out using symlinks, can JMS produce a Master site that allows slave sites A, B, C to have their own domain, and their own template each. and share some or all of their content with the master site?

Thanks,

Eric

First your answer concerning the Symbolic Link is inconsistent as you say that you deploy a slave site into a specific directory and that you receive Symbolic Link error.
If you have such error message, this mean that the Symbolic Link may be available but perhaps not in the directory where you want to deploy it.
This maybe the case if the deploy directory is not part of the open_basedir that seems to have a specific value.

So you have to check the configuration of your HTTP Server and also the permission.

If you want to have a specific joomla template directory, it is strongly recommended to have symbolic link available as most of the "templates" hardcode the path. This is also frequently the case for the "images" directory.

So start to solve your permission issue and open_basedir.
This maybe related to the HTTP server that you are using (for example plesk, directadmin) may have such default configuration that must be changed to accept different directories (sometime account) sharing the infos.

So contact the administrator of the server to fix the permissions and HTTP server configuration to accept the symbolic links.

I have conferred with my hosting provider and they assure me that both manual and scriptable (via php) symbolic links are possible on my server, within my root folder.

This being the case, why does JMS report that symbolic links are forbidden?

Have you tested it with "hello world" ?
Does it reports the same result ?
If they both say that this is forbidden this is perhaps because the option "FollowSymLink" is not enabled or that the directory does not have the "write" permissions.

Review the tutorial video 3 to 7 and check also the "tmp" and "logs" directory permissions.
www.jms2win.com/tutorial#jms12x-6