MAC newb>simple questions>sharing

my office has ten computers on a lan. 8 macs and 2 pcs. one of these machines (dual G5) has two hard drives to store all our files.

i am a longtime pc user and somehow the MAC permissions are not so clear to me. at this point, we are using a single admin user account on the 'fileserver' machine. seems like a very bad idea to me, but that's how it was when i arrived here.

anyways, i assumed i could just create accounts for each user, assign them permissions to a group unix style and that would be that. but ... the permissions in the new account dialogue seem to refer only to applications, and when i logged with the account i created for myself across the network i can still only mount the public folder. and you can't (easily) create custom groups can you?

terribly simple i know, but thanks in advance.

 

OS X Server will run on your standard dual G5 right? But if I can use unix commands with netinfomanager that should solve the problem also. thanks.