Hey all I know is I've got a Mac OS X box (2 actually) that use smb to share files... it's filesystem is HFS+... but the OS itself can mount FAT32 and NTFS locally and read and write to both locally. Also, I'm pretty sure I can take those disks and make them SMB shares as well. HFS+ shares under samba can be read and written to.

Now it's obvious to me that samba is nothing more than a protocol that is used by windows to xfer files over a network... and Linux can use this protocol to share local disks with XFS or whatever filesystem with read write privileges. (I don't know if you can share local ntfs shares on the box via smb...?)

The thing is that UNIX seems at least to me to treat local and remote filesystems pretty much the same... There's got to be some rather easy way to trick it in to thinking a local disk is a remote disk and use the smb protocal to access r/w priv's. It might not be the fastest way to access the files but it at least seems possible.

What I don't know is if there is some kind of "hooks" that have to be developed for the underlying filesystem to support the samba protocol. Which to me seems the only possible hangup.