How would you share files in a small 3-mac office ?

Question

Hi all, thanks for reading
So, I work in a small office. 4 Macs, they are all integrated in a campus network, connected to the internet and to printers; here is not the problem. My question is about the best way to share a bunch of files, so that any of these Macs can read and modify them, but keeping it as simple, inexpensive, and consumer-grade as possible (that is without Mac OS X Server).
The status quo is as following :
We have 3 individual "working-stations" (e.g. iMac G4, G4 Cube, MBP). Each of us has its own, and logs each morning on it's unique personal account. Let's call them (1), (2), and (3).
To share files, we have set up a fourth Mac (actually an old yosemite G3, OS 10.3), with a single account called "team". On this Mac are all the shared files (in Users/team/Documents/), and they all belong to "team".
To access them from the working stations (1), (2), and (3), we connect to this G3 as user "team", and copy, modify, and replace files on it. That way the user "team" is always the owner of all files on this Mac.
It's easy to backup, and via filemaker sharing, we also share an address database from this "pseudo-file-server".
Ok, so in prinicple it works (it worked for some years now).
But it's probably not the best solution. I would like to use Time Machine on a new iMac Core2Duo to backup the shared files, and (if possible) get rid of the extra humming computer. I tried in the past to put the account "team", together with one of the users (say "1") on a single Mac. Nice, with fast user swithching. But then I didn't manage to access the files of "team" from account "1" without messing with the file permissions (In principle I had put the files to share in Users/team/Public -- it was on 10.3)
There are perhaps new possibilities with Leopard (just discovering) -- What would you do to share those files ? Any ideas welcome !
Cheers,
Malte

Answer 1

Here is one possible lead. It's only one lead and I'm sure there are many other ones people here will pass on to you.
I'm using an old PC box with four hardware RAIDed drives and Linux.
Then, the software solution is to use Samba, as file server. Samba allows to force all files dropped on one "share" to be owned by one single user (a user created for that purpose on the Linux box).
[public]
comment = Public service for some users
path = /extra/smb/public
force user = nobody
force group = nobody
writeable = Yes
create mask = 0644
guest ok = Yes
follow symlinks = No
The macs mount this service through CIFS as (example) CIFS://TVNLINUX.SOMEDOMAIN.COM/PUBLIC/
SMB protocol is Ok too, of course.
This can be done without requiring a matching user name on all Macs. The Samba server does the user mapping.
Ok. This doesn't get you with a practical project to jump start on, but you can investigate into solutions that can do alike: remapping users to a default server-side user. If you know some geek that can set you up this kind of box, that's a great solution. It's been running here for some 10 years, and has accommodate everyone since OS 8.
On the other hand, I don't know if Time Machine will back it up. I've fired it and don't see it interested in this network mounted drive. We do back it up, but with simple replications to another system. The RAID helps us with a good level of service. Backups are to protect us from accidental deletions.
I hope this helps.
Thierry