Sounds like a very interesting project, and we'd love to support you with it any way we can, including adding it to our roster of appliances (more about that later).

As to your question, Samba can be a bit of a pain to setup and configure if you're unfamiliar with it. I recommend you start with the following:

apt-get install samba
apt-get install webmin-samba

In my experience, the Webmin samba module should help you get your bearings and with a bit of experimentation you should be able to get things to work. Unfortunately, I can't give you the exact configuration details because I'm not familiar with all of the components in the setup you describe and exactly how they are supposed to work and interact with one another. I probably wouldn't get it right the first time anyhow, as non-trivial integrations like this usually require some testing and tweaking before they work.

However in principle I think I understand what you are trying to accomplish so I will give you a few helpful tips and recommendations:

• Watch out: Samba maintains a separate user database!

  That means a Samba user it not necessarily a Unix user and vice versa. The passwords are also separate. It's important to keep that in mind so you don't get confused. You can map "Windows" users to "Unix" users though. The Webmin module contains a tool for automatically converting unix users to Windows users, though I'm not sure how useful that will be in your case.

• I recommend you first get everything up and running under a single user: www-data. This is the user the web server/Drupal runs as.

  After you get this to work, evaluate your security requirements and decide if you want to do the extra work of having different processes run with different permissions. For a non-security sensitive application such as this you probably don't need to do that.

• After you create a share through the Webmin samba interface you'll be able to configure that share in detail.

  In the "Security and access control" section you'll be able to configure what hosts are allowed access to the share, whether to allow guest access and what unix user to map to the "guest" account.

  In the "edit file permissions" section you'll be able to configure file modes, and whether to force files to be owned by a particular unix user/group and file permissions.

• I recommend configuring an "incoming" directory as a queue so files uploaded via samba by guests on the local network are then moved elsewhere for processing.

  I'm not familiar with media mover so I don't know if it can do that, but you can also accomplish this with a cron job (e.g., runs every 5 minutes, copies files elsewhere, sets permissions and ownership). A Samba disconnect hook/script might also work, but you'll have to experiment with that.

• I recommend you prevent access to all Samba ports from the Internet using firewall rules.

  Samba runs as root and has had security problems in the past. Note that recent versions of the LAMP appliance have a Webmin firewall module.

You may find it helpful to consult the Samba manual pages for reference, especially if you come across terms in the Webmin samba module you don't understand:

man samba
man smb.conf

The manual pages can be a bit cryptic at times though, so you may also find it helpful to consult with a good book such as Oreilly's "Using Samba". I think it's available as an ebook via various outlets. It's also available in the Safari library which offers a free trial.

Be sure to keep us updated on your progress with this project. If you walk us through the integration process in enough detail we should be able to rebuild the appliance on top of a current version of TurnKey Core and add it to our project's roster of opensource appliances, ready for Beta testing by the community.

In the best opensource tradition, you'll get credit and bragging rights of course.

The main advantage of doing that, as opposed to going the independent route is that once we add an appliance to our project we assume the burden of maintaining it at the appliance level, which frees you and other developers to focus on developing the subcomponents and integration specs for the next versions. For example, we will occasionally release new versions of TurnKey Core that includes the latest standard features, bugfixes and Ubuntu updates. When we do that we also rebuild all appliances on top of the new Core.

Hope this helps, cheers!