storage server howto?

[Dan MacNeil <omacneil@brave.cs.uml.edu>]

We want to create a debain based storage server and mount /var/www/
/home and other directories from it onto other servers and workstations.

Right now we're looking at smaba, autofs, amd, smbfs. We've heard bad
things about NFS security, but maybe we haven't looked at it close enough.

What is the best way to run a storage server and mount its shares on
other machines?

Has anyone else out there had any success in using autofs or amd
in combination with smbmount to do this?

Is autofs or amd even necessary (network mount can be added as type smbfs
in fstab)?

We've looked at:

Automount mini-Howto
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Automount.html

Autofs Automounter HOWTO
http://www.linux-consulting.com/Amd_AutoFS/autofs-HOWTO.html

Tried:

modifying /etc/fstab to mount smbfs partition -- ran into the
username/password and permissions issues below

amd package -- seems to be oriented towards using NFS, but the
autofs autmounter howto does mention samba towards the bottom of
section 5.3

Problems:

smbmount requires username and password - this seems to be
fixable by using a file containing credentials and making it
viewable only by the owner

permissions on mounted directory - did a sample mount and the
file permissions for home directories ended up being 755 root
root instead of 755 user group - perhaps this problem can be
remedied by the machines sharing the same passwd and shadow files
(in the long run LDAP will be used)