[jcifs] Re: SMB URL

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 12:22:51PM +0100, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> Am Wednesday 26 March 2003 10:29 schrieb Michael B.Allen:
:
> >
> > > I think, I would even have gone for smb:///?WORKGROUP=workgroup
> > > to make this even less ambiguous.
> >
> > Now I'm confused again. What would this URL resolve?
> >
> Nothing. Just me trying to clean up the semantic. currently it's 
> smb://<server>, when server resolves as workgroup, use it as
> workgroup. This is somewhat strange, as you can't say forehand
> if it's a server or a workgroup - you need to resolve it.

You are correct.  There has been a lot of debate about this overloading of 
the URL.  There are a lot of product vendors out there who feel that 
making the URL user friendly is necessary and, since many of them have 
already gone ahead and implemented, we're sort of stuck...

The idea of using ?name=value is relatively new in the evolution of the 
SMB URL, but the way.

On the other hand, the smb://<server> syntax does make some sort of sense,
Though the <server> portion should actually be <service>.  The Browse 
List is accessed using the SMB protocol so, in a sense, when you request 
the Browse List for a workgroup it is equivalent to accessing the Share 
List from an SMB fileserver.

> With the version above, you would have a host part in the URL if you want to 
> access a server and a workgroup (in the query) if you want to filter for 
> workgroups.

Not quite.

The form smb:// is a request for available workgroups.  Entering
smb:///?WORKGROP=workgroup simply specifies the Local Master Browser from
which to retrieve the list of available workgroups (though an
implementation could choose to ignore that hint).

Chris -)-----

-- 
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org