AFAIK, MacOS 9.x only natively supports connecting to fileservers using AppleTalk.
My networking setup is fine under MacOS9.2 / Classic.
My problem is that MacOS X appears to manage file access like this:
MacOS X Applications
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MacOS X, Virtual File System...
With it's built in support for mounting network shares over NFS and SMB protocols, MacOS X is great!
I can use Finder (or command line) to mount something like "smb://linuxserver/projects" to "/Users/syb/projects/" and all native MacOS X programs can r/w to the mounted "/Users/syb/projects/"...