Miscellaneous problems with embedding passwords in URLs, SAMBA, and other madness

Ok this is a bit of a strange problem so please bear with me and I'm not a sysadmin so pardon any terminology I mix up.
Here's the situation:

Our intranet is comprised of primarily linux boxes with the standard apache setup however we had some power point presentations being shared through Novell located on a Win2000 box. The 2000 box is now having trouble and I have to migrate the power point presentations to a linux box.

The problem is that the old links on our intranet were to the novell share in the form of \\server_name\dir\powerpoint.ppt . After moving the files over to a linux box I tried to link to the files directly via a URL, however this did not work correctly because the sounds were not embedded directly into the powerpoint to save space. What happens is that the powerpoint when linked to directly gets downloaded into the browser's temp files and run from there and since the sounds aren't there things get screwy. Our sysadmin came up with the idea of making a samba share and I would just link to the file via the samba share by href="file://samba_server/dir/powerpoint.ppt" . Now this works fine for users who have normal access to the share, however we need to open this directory up to pretty much everyone. Here's where things get more complicated. The sysadmin says he can open up the share to everyone without a password as long as they're on the same domain as the samba server, however there are several users who are not on that domain. The sysadmin also created a public user and pass for those remaining users not on the domain, however I don't know if there is a way to embed the username and pass in the URL for samba.

Now my question(s) are:
1)Is there a way to open up a SAMBA dir to everyone including those not in the same domain without a password?
2)If 1) is not possible is there a way to embed the public username and password into an html link in the form file://smb_server/dir/powerpoint.ppt
3)Is there a better way than the above? We seem to be jumping through several hoops to get a few power point presentations on our intranet.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
-b

I probally should not answer this as I am not an expert on Samba, but here goes. Yes you can open a directory to everyone regardless of IP. This is done under the [public] section. I dont think you can embed the user and pass samba uses passive authentication protocol. I have never used power point but why can't you just embed the sound with the presentation?

Thanks, for replying, here's the developments so far. Tried the SAMBA stuff, it didn't work as we can't just open up the access to everyone (which removes all the domain settings/priveleges for other drives or so I'm told) for just this one share.

Users can login to the specified share we want by trying to go through network neighborhood, attempting to connect and then logging in, but this really does no good since if this process does not occur before trying the link on the website, the link will just appear dead (no login, no descriptive error message). This makes for a really bad end user experience in a setting where the users are already averse to using computers.

The reason that the sounds cannot be embedded into the powerpoint is that the powerpoint presentations would average around 100MB which would have to be downloaded completely for each user browsing them instead of just the 2.xx MB for the power point presentation and then loading the sound on demand. Combine this with 300+ users and various portions of the network still on clogged 10 megabit lines and it's not a pretty sight.

I really have no good answer to this problem but hopefully the weekend will help shed some light. Thanks for your response though, I appreciate any input you can provide. BTW you wouldn't happen to know how to use fopen() in PHP to check for a file on an unmapped Novell share would you? (This is a workaround thought up by another sysadmin.) fopen("\\NOVELL_SERVER\DIR\FILE", "r"); doesn't work as it believes that it is a local file. Or perhaps a shell script that can check for user permissions from linux on a novell server?

-bcyde