Hello,

I am building a Debian based file server for our office.

Clients : 6 Windows XP machines connecting via Samba

Applications : Quickbooks and MS Access database

The Debian file server will hold the data files for the applications and will be shared by all 6 machines.

Where in the file system should I store these data files. Do I create a new user under /home or is there some standard manner in which to handle these shared data files?

Thanks

I would suggest putting the share on it's own drive, that way the OS is not burdened as much during constant read/write operations to the shared directories.

In that case you could simply mount it to something like /mnt/shared and then point Samba to that.

Really, even if you can't get the share out onto it's own drive, it should at least be on it's own partition, in which case the same /mnt/shared logic would apply.

Basically, for both security and stability/performance reasons, you are better off completely separating the OS from the files which will be accessible over the network.