Directory Configuration

Here's what I wish to do. You can tell me if I'm way off. My two goals are to make file sharing via Samba easy for my users (family), while not totally blowing off Linux customs for file directory layouts.

On the existing Win 95 server, I have one shared directory called FILES. Inside are folders for each user, plus for music, pictures, downloads, etc. We map this to the G: drive on our clients. Everyone can see everything.

In the new setup, I'd like to mirror this setup, except I'd like the folders for each user to be the Linux home directory for each. I would still map the G: drive to this share. Also, I'd like to map the H: drive to each user's home directory in a login script. This way, my family would know that the H: drive is theirs, while they could traverse the G: drive to get to the other users' folders if security access is granted to the 'users' group. I imagine that each of us will have private file areas, plus my wife and I will have exclusive access to financial records using a group called 'adults'. I'll probably set things up for them, since they won't have access to (or knowledge of) a Linux prompt and the various chXXX commands. Finally, I plan to setup a periodic backup of the files to another drive on a different machine. I'd like to exclude the music files from this backup, since they are either off of CDs I have, or backed up somewhere else.

I need to figure out how to setup security and groups to pull this off. Here's what I've come up with so far:

The new drive is mounted on /mnt/hdd1. I created two directories - home and music. I can map these directories to other folders using:

mount --bind /mnt/hdd1/music /music
mount --bind /mnt/hdd1/home /testhome

I probably don't have to map the music folder to a root folder, except to make things easier to find. Does this violate any Linux conventions? I'm thinking that I could share the actual path in Samba just fine.

I would map /mnt/hdd1/home to the /home folder once I'm ready.

Here's the part I'm not very clear on. The user directories in /home have both the owner and group set to the username. Should I change the group to the "users" group? Also, should I set "+s" (set group ID) on the non-user folders (music, pictures, etc.) so that everyone can create files there, but they are owned by the folder owner and group?

Leave your comments, opinions, suggestions, praises, and criticisms below. I'd love to hear from you.