I just use "normal" filesystem (ext4 maybe) on my raspberry pi (used as a samba share for my old computers) and it works without any issues, except that you don't want to exceed 8.3 filenames for anything older than windows 9x or else instead of having "yourlongfilename" renamed to "yourlon~1" you'll get some garbled name (but you'll still be free to navigate through, only it's gonna be harder finding which file is which)

I never tried any other filesystem but I doubt it matters, that problem might be solvable with samba's config (though I don't know what, if you find it let me know !)

Samba doesn't care about the filesystem.
But to access from a dos/Win3.11 computer, you will have to ajust the config,
I didn't try from 3.11, but for a Win98 client I had to use "server max protocol = NT1" in the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf .

Using simply ftp is less problematic. There's a ftp client and also server provided by mtcp
http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/

mTCP's FTP server is wonderful. If you run it on your old machine, you can access it from a modern machine and transfer a lot of files very quickly as long as you keep things 8.3. It's so nice for backups.

nali wrote:

Samba doesn't care about the filesystem.

Samba cares about the file system in that it needs to be able to read it itself. Over the network, SMBFS *is* the filesystem you'll be accessing, so whatever is underlying is irrelevant.

I'd second the idea of running the file server on the old machines and the client on the 'server' - almost certainly it has a nicer UI or at the very least a vastly more powerful shell to work with.

Of course the Linux machine running Samba must be able to read it, I'm not sure it's the point here 😀
BTW, A Linux computer can read quite anything ...

Well, except weird shit like VMS storage volumes.