Serving data from a script

[harakan at btinternet.com]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has done any investigations 
into how to serve data to Samba via a script/application, 
rather than directly from the file system? Or a way to 
map a script into the file system?

Basically, I have an Intranet site (hosted on RH6.2) that 
builds a virtual directory structure from a database, so 
you can access 
http://servername/file/virtual/path/to/file.ext, and the 
access rights, file version, etc. are derived from the 
database. I want users to be able to have read-only 
access to the same files from NT boxes via Samba, but 
still using the database for access control/versioning.

I've looked at extending the source code to support this 
as another type (as with printers), but I can't distinguish 
between local filesystem access for Samba versus local 
filesystem access for client file requests. Of course, I'd 
prefer to be able to support this using a virtual-FS so I 
don't have to change Samba, but I've been unable to 
find any tools that will do it...


Any hints or suggestions much appreciated,

Chris.