Home network design recommendations/tips sought (long)

[Balazs Javor <jb3@freemail.hu>]

Hi,

I have a small home network of 3 machines and I'm looking for
recommendations / best practices on how to set up certain services
between them. I'm more interested in the what then the who at the moment.

I'm especially interested in:
- How to set up my mail so that I can use it from both Linux systems?
- File sharing. NFS vs. Samba. What directories to share? etc.

So here's what I have at the moment:

1. I have a Woody box I'm using right now as my workstation (XFree) and
   also as a server both for outside (Apache, FTP and SMTP) as well as
   for the inside (Samba).

2. My wife has a Windows box. Nothing special. Uses Samba shares.

3. I have a new box, which I intend to take over the role of my primary
   workstation (running Woody/Sid), leaving the current box (slooow) just
   to be a server.

On the server I intend to run a few Internet services (ADSL) for friends and
family. At this moment this means Apache and Proftpd. I'm also running Exim
as a 'smarthost' for the machines on my network.
Finally, I intend to keep all my files on it that I would want to access from
all machines on my network. Right now I'm using Samba so that the Windows box
has access to them, but I'm not sure what's the best way to access them from
the other Linux box.

So here are some questions/issues tha come to my mind:

- Right now I'm using the exim/fetchmail/procmail/mutt combo for my mail.
  And I'm quite happy with the result.
  If I move to the other Linux box as my primary worstation, the question
  arises where to receive the mail to?
  I would prefer to keep them on the server and to be able to use them on 
  both machine as it would be on the local machine.
  I guess this means either IMAP or exporting the mail dir through NFS...

- Speaking of NFS...
  I've read once somewhere that somebody argued that even though NFS is the
  UNIX way, Samba may offer better performance, even between two Linux boxes.
  Is this through?

  Also, to ensure that the contents of the Samba shares are allways accessible
  and modifyable on all boxes including the Windows one, I'd need to ensure
  somehow that everything I put there will be owned by default by the samba
  user ID with appropriate permissins. So far I've tried the sgid bit on the
  directories but I still often have problems with directories created directly
  on the server not being readable on the Windows box... Also some files I
  download and then copy to the appropriate shared dir cannot be deleted/moved
  from Windows. And I don't really want to access local dirs through mounting
  the samba shares just that the permissions are set by Samba automatically...

  Finally, most people tend to voice various security concerns with regard to
  NFS. I generally would like to avoid using RPC services if possible.
  Especially on the server. The same goes for inetd if possible.

  So should I use NFS or Samba?

- Related to the above, if using NFS which directories are woth sharing?
  Having the same environment on both machines is nice, but some guides
  recommend against sharing home directories. Especially when they contain
  ssh keys. On the other hand most configuration files are stored directly 
  under the home dir...

These are just a few issue I could think of right now, but
any other suggestion for the above setup would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks for your help in advance!
best regards,
Balazs


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