Mike,
You can do this, but it requires that you have a working snmpd, or in the case of Windows, know how to configure WMI. I don't know how to do either of those, but that's what it would take. Like you, I also don't like the idea of network mounts, either by NFS or CIFS, as that just seems inherently messy and ripe for carnage.
The hard part is configuring SNMP. If anyone reading this has done that, perhaps they can help.