Greetings,

My name is Mike and I am an MCSE (Hello, Mike). Just had to get that out of the way. I am a reformed 15-year MCSE who is embracing the penguin with both arms. I am tasked with building out a network from the ground, up, and so far it has gone well. This is my 1st post, so be gentle if I am asking a stupid question.

I created one server running BIND9, DHCP, and acts as the Samba PDC (I have Windows clients). It is running great. I have another, much larger server that I have installed Zimbra and Apache on, but it has a TON (almost 3tb) of free space. I don't want to run Samba on my email/web server if I can help it, but is there a way to setup that vast amount of disk space as the space for my file server? Basically, can Samba be configured with a share that uses drive space on another server? If not, what are my options (iSCSI, VMware with an email/www instance and another with Samba DC, etc...)

Humbly submitted.

Samba can share out anything mounted on the local machine; so if you were to mount a share off of the remote drive via NFS, and then set that up as a Samba share, you would essentially be relaying SMB to NFS on the other machine.

I would expect some performance penalties of course, and permissions might be a little tricky to get worked out, but it could certainly be done.

install NFS server on it, and server off your storage via NFS rather than samba.