[TriLUG] recommendations for mounting NTFS shares under Linux

[Geoffrey Douglas Purdy]

Here's some basic info on the problem I'm trying to solve.  I'd
appreciate any recommendations.  I *think* this  should be pretty
straightforward, but I suspect there are a lot of  different ways to go
about doing this and I'd like to determine which is best without a lot of
trial and error.

We have a scientific instrument generates a bunch of files and stores them
in an NTFS share on a Win2K file server.  These files are subsequently analyzed
by an application running on a RH7.1 server.  Basically I'm looking for a better way to
share files between the NT and Linux systems than FTP'ing them across
and which meets the following criteria:

- robust enough to require minimal attention
- must not modify case of characters (i.e.  doesn't convert UC to LC)
- allows file and directory names greater than 32 characters (up to
maybe 64?)
- doesn't choke on oddball characters allowed in Win2K filenames (not a
hard requirement, but would be nice)

One solution which comes to mind is to have the instrument dump the data
files directly to a Samba share on the Linux box.  However, I'd like to
avoid this because it might create instrument vendor tech support issues.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Geoff