[gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

I've got a 2 year old Gentoo machine that got patched together using a
lot of small hard drives which worked fine for what I used the machine
for 2-3 years ago but the machine isn't getting used much anymore. The
processor, memory & MB are all reasonably good - i5-661 & 4GB  - but
my laptop & VM compute server are both faster - so I was wondering
what I might do with the box. I saw a Wired article last night about a
guy building a NAS box using Debian which got me thinking. I've got a
bunch of 1TB Green drives which would make a good base for storage so
there's no cost in doing this, but I don't know anything about network
attached storage that just works out of the box with Windows clients
and I have NO desire (or time) to spend learning stuff that's very
Windows specific.

If there is a good solution for me it needs to support both Win XP and
Win 7 machine and shouldn't require anything be added to the Windows
VM.

Years ago I tried this basic guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml

I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Cheers,
Mark