Setting up a server - Which way to go?

[macally]

I'm in the process of setting up our new office and could do with some advice regarding a server.

We currently have 2 Mac's and 1 PC that will be used in the office and we've purchased a HP Microserver and upgraded the ram to 4GB.

We would like to store our clients work on the server and access it from both the Macs and the PC but we'd also like to run an FTP server on it so that we can setup automated backups of our web servers.

We would also like to be able to connect to the server remotely to access any data on there.

We've got a static IP address in place so that's not an issue.

I'm just wondering what would be the best software to go with. I have been using FreeNAS at home and really like it but don't know if it has this sort of capability. Can anyone advise? Would Microsoft Windows Server be better for us?

 

[sagum]

FreeNAS will do what you want.

It provides a FTP server as well as Samba/Windows share and you can setup usergroups for the FTP accounts to give access to certain folders.
If you're using Mac OS X on, then they shouldn't have any problem accessing the samba share on FreeNAS.

However, I would suggest that you really take security in to consideration when dropping a large volume directly onto the internet.
Remember that anyone who gets access to the FTP server, could potentially have access to everything else on there as well.