One more thought I had. Try to share from Windows XP, which was not possible. Windows XP can't talk to Windows 10. I guess that's not a critical issue, because what I'm trying to do is more critical.

Trying mageia. Probably won't have enough RAM to do it, but trying anyway. Since I can use my laptop to test, plenty of RAM there though.

Mageia is installing on my test machine right now.

...

However...

I had a thought... I think that "if" both Mandriva Linux 2010.1, AND Windows XP, understands my USB devices, which I have plugged into the machines, AND if there's a way to make those USB devices show up in Virtual Box, THEN, I could probably have them pass through to the virtual machines (choosing select virtual machines). Then, I could share the drives from there, and I could allow vmain to get the shared drives from there, instead. I guess I would also have to have shared drives using vritual box, which would share hopefully every hard drive. Then, I would have those there, and then I could do a back method to what I want to do. If it won't be too slow, then I've got it that way...

If that method works, I think that's what I will do. First, I'll check out the basics with Mageia. Then, I'll try my method...

Got mageia installed and running. It runs okay with nearly 1GB of RAM, it appears. No way, I'm sticking it with the same amount of RAM as Mandriva, however.

Frankly, I'm impressed with what I see. If it would only run, I might just do nothing but try to use it as first priority. However, it won't run, I'm sure. Not with the environment I need it to have. The "technology" (sorry, I don't have a better word to describe it), is now just about right. Only the hardware upgrade problem ($$$) prevents me from "jumping" to that solution.

Now, I shall try to use the USB method. We'll see if that works...

First, I'll need to back up every server. Downtime, here I come!

Success! Without using any different software or interfaces! The solution was simple, once I knew how:

This means, even older versions of samba, will work. But it's untested on samba 2.* and earlier. In fact, it's untested on anything less than the version of 3.5.*, that I have. For now, don't need that old stuff to work. My server should never be older. May be newer "someday", but should never be older. Only one server must understand the stuff. Everything else just has to understand how to connect to samba. The only other samba server it should know how to connect to, is my NAS (Buffalo). However, I've never had any problems with it so far. I know it's running a version of samba itself.

Everything is backed up, documented, and going now. I guess I solved this on my own, and just needed a place to store documentation information. Sometimes it goes that way...

Hopefully this will help others who need to do similar things, such as either connect to Windows 10, or do the exact sort of thing I did.