OS X and FreeBSD: What could be a good setup

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Apr 2, 2004, at 12:06 PM, Doug Poland wrote:

> Panna wrote:
>
>
>> You see I'm in a state of confusion..
>
> You're simply using a FreeBSD as a file server.  You serve up
> files to the client via NFS (OS X) or CIFS (Windows).  FreeBSD doesn't 
> care.  Now if you want FreeBSD to understand and manipulate those 
> files
> is a different issue.
>

See, this is part of where I was getting a little munged up in trying 
to figure out how I want to aim for renetworking my home...

I'm looking at using FreeBSD on a server (web, mail, file server) with 
OS X, Windows, and probably Linux clients.  I'd like the FreeBSD server 
to handle authentication, but that may be a pipe dream to accomplish 
across platforms easily :-/

For the file serving I was looking at NFS (especially using the NFS 
server with Services for Unix under Windows), but the common 
cross-platform version may too insecure to use comfortably, especially 
with wireless (most of my wireless connections are wrapped in ssh if 
they're important anyway).

That would leave SMB/CIFS, meaning SAMBA, but I haven't found anyone 
able to tell me if CIFS is secure "over the wire".  I seem to recall a 
utility that would sniff network packets and if NFS is used, it can 
capture the files as they're travelling over the network; can this 
happen with CIFS?

I would really rather NOT use mixed protocols to share; NFS for 
Linux/OS X, CIFS for Windows...then I'd have increased overhead to 
managing permissions, etc...

Advice?