I am leary about using samba and cups to host my files and printers, but ideally I would like to have all my USB devices available to the network via one source, my server. All my computers are running some form of Windows XP or Vista and I have one sever set up running Ubuntu Server.

In theory is it possible to have my USB external hard drive connected to my linux server, as well as my printer/scanner/fax and still be able to utilize it the same way I would if it's connected to my windows machine?

If so can I make it so my external (FAT32) is also visible via ftp or perhaps mountable over the internet, with appropriate user permissions of course?

It is most certainly possible to have printers, and removable devices usable via a Linux box and Samba as though they were connected locally!

If you have your external drive mounted and shared through Samba, you would not need to use something like FTP to access it - it would be like a shared network drive in "My Network Places" (I've never used Vista, but I can only imagine they've changed the name for that, too).

When you say "over the internet", do you mean to make the drive accessible from another household, or just from another computer from within the same network in your house/apartment?

To be less vague, what I meant was I want to be able to access the drive/mount it from another house/building with say another computer my network doesn't know about (the user is known however). I would like to have the drive accessible to me at work. Or on vacation in a hotel etc.

I did, incompletely, read a post somewhere that it was possible, but unsafe having something to do with Samba itself, or not necessarily samba, but the whole windows file sharing protocol. Is that true?

(maybe I'm thinking VPN?)

By default, the shared directory for FTP are the home directory of the user, if I remembered correctly. (sorry, I don't tinker much with FTP).

Although there might be some ways you can change the shared directories, for the simple purpose, maybe it should be easy to just add a symbolic link to the path of the removable drive or whatever you want to share? Add it to the user's home directory, he/she then should be able to access it.

Let me know how that goes ^^

Have a look into openvpn- that should do what you seem to be describing

It took a little while (due to other projects) but I have worked out how to use Samba. All the replies were helpful so thank you very much.

I now have my Ubuntu server running Samba and it works flawlessly with XP and Vista. And it does allow access to the drive via domain name. (ie. \\myserver.com\share_drive)

Again thank you all for your quick and accurate responses and further more I am looking into an open source VPN solution to use for my team.