Hi,

I need to transfer webserver-log-like-files containing periodically from windows production servers in the US to linux servers here in India. The files are ~4 MB in size each and I get about 1 file per minute. I can take about 5 mins lag between the files getting written in windows and them being available in the linux machines. I am a bit confused between the various options here as I am quite inexperienced in such design:

1. I am thinking of writing a service in C#.NET which will periodically archive, compress and send them over to the linux machines. These files are pretty compressible. WinRAR can convert 32 MB of these files into a 1.2 MB archive. So that should solve the network transfer speed issue. But then how exactly do I transfer files to linux? I could mount linux drive on windows server using samba, or should I create an ftp server, or send the file serialized as a POST request. Which one would be good? Also, I have to minimize the load on the windows server.
2. Mount the windows drive on linux instead. I could use the mount command or I could use samba here (What are the pros and cons of these two?). I can then write the compressing and copying part in linux itself.

I don't trust the internet connection to be very stable, so there should be a good retry mechanism and failure protection too. What are the potential gotchas in these situations, and other points that I must be worried about?

Thanks, Hari