[jcifs] NBT Classes?

[Allen, Michael B (RSCH)]

I'm not quite sure what you mean but the jcifs.netbios package is independantly
usefull from the others. It needs stuff from the jcifs.util package but it does not
need the jcifs.smb package (except the remote lmhosts file feature of the
jcifs.netbios.Lmhosts class but that can be disabled). With 0.6 I made some
significant changes to how the jcifs.smb package used the jcifs.netbios
package. Ideally I want to completely abstract netbios from the jcifs.smb
package. This is in anticipation of using netbiosless transport supported by
newer microsoft servers. To do this I introduced the jcifs.UniAddress wrapper
class for handing both netbios and DNS name services. You'll notice that most
incedence of NbtAddress within the jcifs.smb package have already been
replaced with UniAddress (although there are a few places where it is still used
for workgroup and netbios specific functions). In the future there may also be a
UniSocket class to abstract the NbtSocket. When all is said and done,
references to jcifs.netbios classes should be completely removed from the
jcifs.smb package.


You can still use the jcifs.netbios classes. One time someone from jPOS
wanted to use the netbios sockets layer for a clients custom system that used
netbios transport. I don't know if it worked for him but it was a reasonable thing
to do with the jcifs.netbios package. If you have netbios specific needs (e.g.
node status, name lookups) then it can be used directly. But if you just want an
InetAddress of a host on your LAN wheather it be a NetBIOS host or  resolved
by DNS, use the UniAddress class. There is no reason to use classes from the
jcifs.netbios package or jcifs.UniAddress if you are doing normal file operations.
jCIFS will use them as necessary based entirely on the input SMB URL.

Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Rob Wygand [SMTP:rob at filefish.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, December 06, 2001 6:01 PM
> To:	jcifs at samba.org
> Subject:	[jcifs] NBT Classes?
> 
> 
> Mike,
> 
> Just a silly question. All the NBT classes and underlying engine for SMB 
> are all package level. I would think that these might be useful on their 
> own. Is there any reason you wrote them this way?
> 
> Just curious, more than anything,
> rjw
> 
>