samba via nfs = bad

[Drew Fitzsimmons]

At work we have got some linux machines which run a proprietary
software product. The vendor supplied the whole system on fedora core
2 boxes and the set up runs something like this:
One of the boxes acts a s a server and contains the data which is used
by all the other systems.
All the other 6 boxes connect to a single nfs share on that machine.

Recently there was a disk failure on the server box and all the data
went away...

I haven't had much to do with the systems but it turns out that the
server runs a single 10k rpm disk, no RAID no redundancy at all. This
is clearly a very bad idea and now that one failure has happened it
has been decided that the system should be a little more robust
(always the way)

Anyway it turns out the company do sell a dedicated server with
redundancy but it costs about £100k which is rather a large amount of
money.

The plan now is to implement something our in house.

After about 10 mins of poking about on the system I showed my boss how
it is possible to mount a share on an existing windows server. Then
make the directory which the software expects to see a symbolic link
to this smb mount allowing the data to be stored on an existing server
(which has RAID etc.)

The problem is that the other machines that mount this directory as an
nfs share aren't able to see the samba share via the nfs mount (hope
that makes sense)

Obviously this is not the best way to do things but why can't they see
the data in the smb share? is it because it's symbolic link or is it
because it's going through an nfs share to get to a smb share?

Has anyone got any suggestions as to what is the best way?

The things I've thought of so far are:

Mount the same samba share on all the 7 fedora machines. This might
well be the simplest way.

Set up a dedicated Linux server and  change the nfs mounts to point to
a directory on this machine.

Also if they were to set up a dedicated server what sort of spec
machine do think would be needed RAID type disk type etc. (I know this
is dependent on amount of data and reads and writes etc)

-- 
Drew Fitzsimmons