I'm building a home file server using samba so I can create shares for my windows machines. I would like to migrate all of my data over to the Linux box and was wondering if I could somehow continue to use Truecrypt on my windows laptop to mount a Truecrypt volume (file container) over a network share.

The host OS of my server is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I downloaded TrueCrypt 7.1a. After a few chown and chmod changes I was able to create the volume but I'm getting errors stating that the volume is not a recognized file system. The file system that hosts the volume is ext4 so this error makes sense.

Just wondering if there is a workaround or alternate solution that will allow me to create a private encrypted container on my Linux file server, accessible over a samba share from Windows clients.

I guess my question now is would this work if I mounted an NTFS volume in Linux and stored the encrypted container within the NTFS volume? I have read about ntfs-3g / fuse and other technologies but have no experience with them.

Local file and folder encryption doesn't translate well to networked encryption. I could me missing the issue here.

You can create an encrypted folder but if you mount it then it will be open to anyone with cifs permissions.

Almost every OS now has ntfs-3g and it is pretty simple to open local drives as read-write. Generally distro's allow only read (old ntfs) so you have to tell it to open read-write.