Except for the time you invest in acquiring, installing, and configuring the software, you're not out a thing. In the early 1990s Andrew Tridgell, a graduate student in Canberra, Australia, developed Samba as a way to emulate DEC's pathworks product on his Sun workstation. It has since grown and expanded to many different platforms. Lars did this on his own initiative and time as a first step in providing a mechanism to access the CD-ROM drive built into many HP 3000s now that HP is discontinuing the MPE CD Extensions product. Once installed and configured, your HP 3000 will appear as any other MS Windows server on your network.
Security is handled in several different ways.
You may also assign a particular MPE user and account to a particular session. A good example of this is allowing a particular user access to the files within his normal MPE group and account. Uppercase is important since HFS is case-sensitive. Samba on the HP 3000 also has a few of the same limitations as it does on UNIX systems. First is the problem of mapping the filenames from one system to the other.