>a) Setting up SAMBA to access TurboImage database and
>   other files like MSG files for control

Don't waste too much time on that idea... Samba won't be able to
open PRIV files like Image datasets and it also does not handle MSG
files. Posix has no idea about such MPE specific things. And even
if you *could* open Image datasets or MSG files from the PC side,
the PC itself would have no idea how to properly work with them.

You could have the NT machine drop database extracts (flat files,
fixed columns or comma delimited) on a SAMBA share to get them to
the 3000 side easily, however, you would need some way to trigger
a program to perform the import into Image (or Image/SQL...)

The trigger mechanism might be the "magic file" feature of Samba,
which allows configuring an action (eg a shell command or script)
that is executed when the PC client closes a file on the share. I
have never used that myself, though. I did use "dummy printers"
for a similar purpose, though; a PC application would send its
printout to a "printer" shared by the 3000 and the data would end
up being "piped" into an MPE command/program for processing.

Lars.