Year 2000

[Andrew Tridgell]

> Okay...This has probably been asked before, but are there any issues
> with Samba for the year 2000 ? We are currently using Samba all over the
> world and have got a team looking into Year 2000 compliancy for all the
> applications we run.

We really need to put up a web page on this ... hmmm, does anyone feel
like writing one?

My standard answer goes something like this:

- Samba itself does not suffer from Y2K problems. Internally dates are
  stored in the standard Unix 32 bit time since 1970 format. 

- The SMB protocol does not have a Y2K problem. None of the date
  formats in SMB (and there are several) are ascii and none suffer
  from Y2K rollover.

- The operating system that you run Samba on *may* have a Y2K
  problem. We have no way of knowing if it does. This means that Samba
  might fail in Y2K due to the failure of some essential underlying
  service (networking, printing subsystem etc). You can take some
  comfort in the knowledge that nearly all unix system utilities do
  what Samba does and use 32 bit time since 1970 date formats which do
  not suffer from a Y2K problem. 

- The clients you use to access Samba may have Y2K problems. This is
  in fact the most likely source of difficulties. If the clients do
  hve a problem then it won't matter which server you are using
  (WinNT, Samba, Syntax etc), you will hit the same problems.

- I would greatly appreciate it if people who run Y2K tests involving
  Samba could please forward the results to me or this list. If you
  send them to me then please tell me if you will allow me to publish
  the results on the Samba web site.

> Incidentally, since most of the Samba Team seem to read this group, has
> anyone thought of being able to specify other samba servers/shares in the
> path line of a share that would re-direct the connection (kinda like the NIS
> homedir function I guess) This would be useful if a share moves from one
> machine to another, we could point the original request to the new location
> (and take some accounting information so we know which machines to change)
> 
> Eg.
> 
> [test]
>     comment = Test share
>     path = \\new_machine\test

yes, we plan on adding this. It is called "DFS referrals" and is now a
standard part of the SMB protocol. It won't actually be that hard to
implement we just haven't got around to it.

Note that with DFS referrals you can redirect not just whole shares,
but also any part of a share! You could redirect a subdirectory (or
even an individual file) to another server. Supporting this will need
some clever smb.conf syntax, in a similar fashion to the "mangled map"
option. 

Cheers, Andrew