Management of Samba

[Andrew Tridgell]

> 1) CORBA
> 2) DCE/RPC
> 3) proprietary.

yep!

Personally I think that the http method is a good interim method
because of its simplicity. 

Eventually I'd like to fully support remote admin via DCE/RPC so that
existing MS tools (ie. user manager for domains etc) can be used for
many of the admin tasks. Luke has already done quite a bit of work
along these lines.

To make the MS DCE/RPC stuff really work we would have to extend it
quite a bit to support all the config stuff that Samba has. I'm not
really sure how feasible this is, so we may end up only supporting
DCE/RPC config of stuff that has a direct parallel in the NT world. In
that case we would use some other mechanism (such as http) for full
config support.

Combine this with a CORBA (or generic ORB) interface from Dave and we
will have something that should suit everyone!

I think the CORBA interface will be the trickiest because it will be
hardest to connect it to all the internal structures in Samba. The
http and DCE/RPC solutions can just call internal Samba routines for
that sort of thing. 

Dave, another thing I should mention is the Java based Samba config
system that Jason wrote (see the Samba GUI page). That may provide you
with a useful parser written in Java which could be useful in a ORB
environment. The other big advantage of this config manager is that it
supports the retaining of comments in smb.conf files. That's something
I haven't done in SWAT, and I haven't really come up with a good way
to do it.

Cheers, Andrew