Hello. Sorry for posting here, but Slackware will be involved somewhat in the process.
Have you played around with NAS servers? We need to have about 3-4TB of storage space shared between some servers. I looked at Intel's SS4000-E, a little box with 4 SATA II hot-swapable HDDs, everything embedded and configurable only by web interface. It seems a little limited. My thought was to purchase one of the 1 meter high Antech cases, slap 2 PSUs, an Intel server entry-level board, 2 or 3 SATA controllers and all the HDDs we want and build software RAIDs.
Now the questions: what makes the difference between a normal copmuter with lots of HDDs and a NAS server? How will Windows 2K and 2K3 behave with mapped samba shares? Will Windows's quota system work? Will I be able to use Windows permissions for the files on the share? If not, how can I do these things?
Thanks.

Have a look at http://www.freenas.org/FreeNAS.

Dennisk

I read the FreeNAS documentation. It isn't answering my questions.

Check out the info at http://www.openfiler.com/ . Maybe it will be more helpful.

I read all docs from FreeNAS, Openfiler, NASLite, Darma a.s.o.
The main thing that I see about them is that they are small embedded OS-es (mainly based on xNIX flavours). They have cute web interfaces but Slackware can do also do all that stuff.
What I'm asking is how do I map a samba share (or some other kind of share) onto the Windows server in such a way that Windows manages access rights and quota? The server is an AD, so I cannot let linux manage users and such (anxiously waiting for Samba 4 )