Linux/Web question - embed Samba Username and Password in Links?

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

sounds quite complicated to me...

samba knows a "guest" account to be used for users not known to the system. Windows systems always try to use "guest" as username if they can´t connect using the logged-in user. i never tried this though.
if it does not help, ask your sysadmin if they could change samba setup to NOT use the domain but share-level security instead. but i can´t recommend this. You´ll loose all the domain-specific features in samba then. it depends on your setup if this is a way to go...

afaik - no

imho one better way would be changing the PPTs to use a sound that is supplied eg. via the web-server (http). if you have quite many of them, you could write a VBA program to convert them all.

... my 2ect. hope anyone can take advantage of it ...

Thanks for the very prompt response. Yes it's a pretty convoluted situation, but my hands are tied. I'm hoping the "guest" settings will work, I have forwarded your post over to the sysadmin and am crossing my fingers.

Thanks again,
-b

hope you kept my name in there...

Well unfortunately the guest thing didn't work, I think the sysadmin made a samba user called guest with no password and that did not work (I tried logging in as guest and also just leaving the username and pass blank).

Oh well thanks for the help anyway. I don't suppose you know of a way to get windows to save your samba login info if it does not match your windows user/pass do you???

If you find a solution I promise to send your name to the sysadmin in a large obnoxious HTML tagged email (heh I find it pretty humorous how most of the *nix sysadmins I know hate HTML mail) and I promise to name my the next postgres db we use here after you.

Well I know it's a long shot, but thanks for your previous advice.
-b