First of all, I was not even expecting a correct answer, so its not that im pist off because no one was able to give it to me, i got pist off because I specified that SMB was not a solution, and I got a SMB answer. Secondly, the FTP server is not underpowered, it handles its work load just fine. Thirdly, and most importantly, the main reason for not wanting another protocol is security. THere are already too many services available on the network, and *YES* security is a concern, as the HNSG network offers SSH/telnet access to anyone that can login as request and answer a few questions. There are iptables rules set on all the linux boxes to not allow any server to communicate with the 98 box (except for the FTP server). This is not a bastardised system, it is a system with as few services as possible. For those of you that will tell me that SMB is secure, let me remind you of zero-day exploits. This is an extremely vunerable, and thus protected network that I set up, maintain, and secured. That is the true reason, although additional SMB services on the FTP server will diminish resources that could better be put towards proftpd, or one of the distributed computing projects it runs in the background. Like I said, this is a highly secure network we're talking about here, so MSFTP or IIS is *DEFINETELY* out of the question. Not only that, but I fail to understand how making the win98 box a FTP server will fix things, only complicate them, as there is already a FTP server. I will admit that I am no where near as good in Windows as I am in *NIX, that is why I posted here. After much thought on this subject, I am about ready to just say screw it. I've tried everything I can think of, from editing the 98 box's registry and changing //hostname/share of a tested map to
ftp://hostname to
ftp://user@hostname and changing the service definition from Microsoft Networking to God only knows how many abbreviations of FTP I could think of. I may just have to live (or rather, the user will have to live) with having a shortcut instead of a mapped drive, or just install win2k (which supports FTP-mapped drives). I've heard of it being done, but like so many MS-related stuff, it takes a win32 kernel hacker to find out how to do it, which I definetely am not. Oh yeah, and pppd won't work, as the connection needs to be at least 100 Mb/s, with the exception of some Gigabit servers (backup, etc). I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist, as I don't want any client software installed extra to re-install when the damn 98 box goes down for the third time in a month, like most 98 boxes often do.