Eric, <br><br><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Thanks for your comments.  Just as a followup here are responses and a couple of addtional questions and items for clarification.</span><br><br>&gt; I think you want to disable RAID on the MB, and let Linux handle the raid<br>

&gt; processing (aka software raid). I&#39;m not sure what happens with the<br>&gt; configuration you&#39;ve described.<br><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" color="#3366ff"><br>I checked the RAID configuration again and it is controlled with Ubuntu and not the MB.  I configured the RAID as a part of the installation of Server 10.04.<br>

</font><br>&gt; SMB and CIFS are pretty much the same thing. I could say simply that CIFS is<br>&gt; &#39;better&#39; (given that it&#39;s a newer dialect of SMB), but that would be<br>&gt; misleading. Do some googling and you&#39;ll find links such as this:<br>

&gt; <a href="http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2007-03/msg01423.html">http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2007-03/msg01423.html</a><br><br><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" color="#3366ff">My understanding is that CIFS does not use the smb.conf file for file server settings (I may be wrong on that).  Also that Samba is backward compatible with older Windows OS like ME, 98 (my oldest Windows box is XP Pro).  Currently file server is running CIFS, with the following added to fstab on client box:<br>

<br></font><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" color="#0000ff">//<a href="http://192.168.0.2/av">192.168.0.2/av</a>   /home/username/av   cifs  
credentials=/home/username/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode,0777,dir_mode=0777
0 0</font><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">av being the desired shared directory on the server </span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">In each home directory of each user (client box) I have added the .smbcredentials file with the following:</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">username=username</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">password=password</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" color="#3366ff"><br>

This is working in one desktop however when I try to duplicate it on another. I am getting an error when trying to mount the drive.<br></font><br>&gt; KISS. Use what&#39;s simple. In a home environment, centralized user accounts<br>

&gt; are overkill, and not simple (unless you&#39;re a seasoned *nix administrator).<br>&gt; You might consider simply allowing guest access to everything, then<br>&gt; tightening restrictions as you go.<br><br><font color="#3333ff">I have a business folder and a webdev folder that I want protected from Kids and guests mainly so there are no inadvertent losses in files or overwrites etc.  Most computers are shared access with user accounts.  So I want the two folders above not even to appear on kids or guest accounts.  This is where things get confusing for me in fstab (client side) and smb.conf (server side).  Eventually I would love to have separate servers for these however its not in the budget yet.<br>

</font><br>&gt; I would use samba(CIFS) for windows access, NFS for linux access.<br>&gt; Automounting is pretty slick with CentOS/RHEL, and I expect that Ubuntu has<br>&gt; something similar. Also, you might consider using Netatalk for Mac access.<br>

<br><font style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" color="#3366ff">So run NFS fileserver and Samba(CIFS) fileserver simultaneously on headless server and configure clients </font><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">with either NFS client or samba(CIFS) client depending on OS?</span><br>

<br><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">I purchased <font color="#3333ff">Using Samba 3rd Edition by O&#39;Reilly to learn more about Samba, Where can I find good doumentation of Samba, CIFS, and NFS?  As you have commented more advanced configuration will require some seasoning.  Much of the forum answers to questions are understandably short on context and usually just generate more questions.  </font></span><br>

<br><font color="#3333ff">Again thanks for your help.</font><br><br><br>-- <br>James<br><br><br><br>