what we do right now:
-----------------------

currently our workgroup runs 2 windoze servers as PDC / backup, tape-backups are made at some time by our current admin (not me).
unfortunately those machines have proven to be unreliable and the raid controllers (raid 1) are a
piece of ..... . Guess what happens when one disk goes bad... the almighty raid controller
happens to realize that the 2 disks don't match anymore and chooses to mirror the BAD data onto the good one ;-(

anyway, one benefit of working at university is having a quite potent data-center with climatized
server rooms + automatic backups. no more tape fiddling for us.

sadly I cannot make the staff of tha data-center run a samba server and maintain it for us.



what I like to do:
------------------

get THEM to create a BIG BIG folder for us, run automatic backups on that, and share it with NFS to us.

all OUR pdc (linux+samba) would have to do is mount that share with NFS and re-share it with samba to our windows clients.

I tried to simulate that with 2 linux boxes. Unfortunately I have not been able to
share a folder mounted with nfs - I know how to setup samba and nfs, but it seems
I just cannot share data that does not physically reside on server itself. on other words
I can't re-share a share.


network topology:


( our clients <--> our pdc ) <--> ROUTERS <--> DATA-CENTER
subnet A

any clues ?

I do this regularly with no special setup. Just mount the NFS share and share the mount point with samba. The difference between my setup and yours is that the machines all live on the same subnet, but looking at your description, I don't see why it wouldn't work the same way on your network.