> For the simpler solution you outlined, is NFS a better way to > go than SMB > [Samba]?
Either will work, but NFS imposes a lot less overhead than SMB. If you anticipate Windows systems needing direct access to the filesystems, then you might consider using SMB, but if not, then the overhead cost is probably prohibitive. It's not an either-or setup; you might consider using NFS between the Linux systems and have one of them run Samba to provide an external interface to the Windows systems w/o exposing the file server directly. Using NFS does imply that the numeric UID values for all users be identical on all the systems accessing the shared file systems. You may want to set up the "file server" system also as a NIS master server (or use LDAP or Kerberos for authentication). -- db
