Samba's not a goer. Doesn't do Unix permissions. It's a Windows/OS/2 sharing scheme.
I was wondering about that ...There is nfs over ssl but its not yet ported to linux: http://www.crufty.net/Products/sNFS.html
There is shfs, an ssh file system, but it seems too immuture to use on a corperate network : http://shfs.sourceforge.net/index.html
what about http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/smbfs/ . smbfs with unix extentions?
Cheers Paul