Linux NAS compatible with OD ACLs

Hi,

I’m looking to add a storage server to my network, but not to the extent of the XSan route. I don’t think I will ever need (or can afford) Fibre Channel speeds, so I want to but put a few terabyte drives in another box and serve files out of there.

Here’s my idea: Take a machine, load Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, whatever) on it, choose a filesystem to format my volume with, install and configure whatever packages necessary to get AFP/NFS/SMB working, and be able to specify permissions using the users and groups hosted on my OS X 10.5 OD server. Is this possible, or too farfetched?

Most of the tutorials and postings I see out there are in regards to using Linux as the OD server, hosting home directories and the like. All I am interested in are a couple of file shares that I can specifically allow or disallow users access to based off of their group permissions in my existing network.

Does an ACL based filesystem such as XFS have any specific advantage over ext3? Can I even apply my Apple ACL’s to XFS? Is there a filesystem that supports Unicode naming so I can use AFP and still let people use apostrophes in file names and spaces at the end of directories?

Thanks for any information you share. 🙂

Ray