I want to make a Linux file server for my household to use but also be able to access it anywhere I am. I was googling tutorials about making a fileserver and I guess I need samba? But what do I do about accessing it outside my LAN?

I'm almost a complete linux newbie, the extent of my experience is cracking my own WEP key for fun in BackTrack.

I'm open to all ideas and suggestions, so I have some questions.

1) What's the best program to use for the file server (Samba?)

2) How can I access it remotely? (FTP the best way?)

That's about it! =]

I look forward to hearing from you guys and thanks in advance!

IMO the simplest server to run, easily accessible from any platform, is an apache web server. You don't have to host webpages in .html, or anything else. Apache can just provide an index of files.

And if you want them in a real file manager, sftp can work, or make a SSH VPN tunel to your network and access them using samba. Samba is great for LAN, but forget about it for public network.

Thanks for the posts guys but Elv13 I honestly understood none of that haha.

I played around with apache before in windows but couldn't get it to work correctly, I'd be willing to give it a shot again in ubuntu (the OS I'm using).

I thought FTP would be simpler to use for transfering files because my wife is going to be using it to share files from home and work and I to be able to access files I don't want to carry around with me. Every computer accessing the server is going to be windows so I thought I would just use Filezilla.

Am I going about this wrong? Just now I've been trying to install Proftpd and I know it's verboden but the lack of gui is difficult right now ha.

If you used eg Centos (free version of RHEL) as your server, & you only need (secure) FTP functionality, then you could use sftp, part of the ssh SW suite. For external access I'd definitely use sftp. You can use the Filezilla client for access.
You'll have to fwd port 22 through your router/firewall.
You can use the RHEL Admin guide to manage it: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html
OpenSSH: http://www.openssh.com/