I'm currently administering my Debian webserver from my PowerMac G5 using a combination of SSH and Netatalk/AFP. I find Netatalk's metadata files pretty obnoxious and am thinking about just going with SMB. But that seems kind of silly too, since that would mean I'd have my Linux box and my snappy new Mac both emulating Windows machines. Is NFS a better option for me? I've never used it but from what I'm reading it seems to be a pretty simple Unix-native protocol.

Are there other options here that I'm missing out on? WebDAV, for instance? I guess my problem in this case is too many options, since I can pretty easily set up both boxes to talk AFP/SMB/NFS/WebDAV/FTP/God only knows what else... I'm not familiar enough with the differences to know what the "best" choice is.

I've Googled around a bit and haven't yet found a good overview of the different options; if anyone knows of a good resource for this stuff I'd be thrilled if you could link it.

Thanks in advance!

The SMB protocol suit is a microsoft protocol. I am personally using samba on a linux only network with an old motorolla mainframe (just for fun), and I think samba is a good choice for anybody.

It is easy to configure and offers, appart from file-serving, printer-serving (spooling). I have however never worked with Nettalk before, so I am propably not the most appropriate person to give you adivise on this topic.

I would suggest you run up a linux server running samba (parallel to Nettalk, if possible) and use it to get the flavor of configuring and using samba. If yoou like it, replace your old system with samba...

NFS doesn't seem to work out as great as it sounds, It has some authentication and permissions "quirks." Although NFS is the "UNIX" method and SMB is the "Windows" method, SMB is still a better choice IMO. Other options include SCP/SFTP which is just an enriched SSH client made for file copying (there are some slick SFTP clients that are as easy to use as the simplest FTP GUI clients) and plain old FTP.