[SLUG] Linux and Windows integration question

[Simon Bryan <sbryan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A question to gather some collective wisdom.....(Sorry for the length of 
this post)

An outline:
We run Windows workstations (most unlikely to change in any major way),
We have to use MS software (kind of parent / staff driven)
We have run out of space for our user directories on the NT server and so 
are looking into a network attachable diskdrive (120GB)
We are also running Linux as our gateway, with Squid, Apache, email and 
lately AUC.
AUC has been a great success and is driving up computer usage and hopefully 
learning.  :-)

Now the problem:
I want to put all our user directories onto the new 'NetDrive'
I need to share them for use by Windows
I want to make them the same home directories as appear in AUC - currently 
'/home/popusers/xxxx/username, where xxxx is the year they started in Year 7

So, am I going to be able to achieve this?
Should I setup the 'NetDrive' as an NT or Linux drive (it will do either)?
When setup how do I get both systems to see the home directories (pretty OK 
with Windows - map a drive letter and use that in user creation scripts).
Pretty sure I would do the same from Linux using Samba, but how to set the 
correct permissions?
At the moment on the Windows computer we have /Users/Students/xxxx/Username 
as home directories and only have the one share at /User/Students then use 
permissions on the directories to ensure privacy below that.
Is this a job for Winbind?

Any suggestions, resources, readings etc appreciated as I have a couple of 
weeks to sort this all out in my head before I have to implement it.

This combined with AUC should pretty well ensure contract renewal!  :-)



Simon Bryan