Bad Suggestion!

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, William Stuart wrote:

> Well...
> 
> I have read in recent days many issues regarding the future of SAMBA.  It
> seems to me that there are many complaints about how NT works and the
> protocols they use lacking in...well...intelligence...
> 
> Perhaps it is time that a member of the SAMBA team wrote a 'SAMBA Network
> Service' for NT

*love* to, been finding out info on how to do this for over 2 years, on
and off.  does anyone have $100,000 to spare, i will spend it on tony
mason's file-system driver kit and port smbclient to nt in under six
weeks.

alternatively, does anyone wish to persuade microsoft to change their IFS
kit license terms such that:

a) the code written is not owned by microsoft

b) any ifs driver written at any time cannot compete with microsoft's own
ifs drivers that they may write now or in the future.


> and a "Client for SAMBA Networks" for Win95/98.

no, no and no.  never.  not in a million years.  win95 can go sit in a
cess-pool of its own making until it dies a toothless death.  oops, sorry,
am i getting carried away, here?  my contempt for win95 i only hope is
offset by my respect for nt.

> You guys have the "Embrace" down pat...  Now, how about some "Extend"!

the arguments against doing this are that there would not be enough people
interested in installing client-side services just to "extend" the SMB
protocol or its usage for specific purposes when there already exists a
"perfectly good" client out-of-the-box.  i would love to ignore any such
arguments just for the sheer fun of it.

a valid counter-argument is that you could potentially run smb over ssl to
samba.  this is encrypting user data, which government agencies get really
uptight about, and is one of the [valid] reasons why the ms ifs kit has
such a stringent license and is also, i suspect, why the ifs kit is only
available in the u.s. and canada.

lots of people, basically, are afraid of losing control over various
things (e.g the development of cifs).

luke