Possible to integrate Samba with Roxen Challenger?

Dan Kaminsky effugas at best.com
Fri Mar 12 13:25:40 GMT 1999


>The implementation I'm thinking of is making Samba ask Challenger
>about user authentification, directory listings, files ans so forth
>through a simple protocol. Samba would still be a separate process,
>but would be spawned and controlled by Challenger. The protocol could
>of cource be used by other servers that have similar need of the SMB
>protocol.
>
>The reason I ask here is twofold. First I do think you can tell me
>whether it would be simple or extremely hard to implement these
>changes, since I found the size of the Samba source code slightly
>intimidating. Secondly I want to know if you think this is a good
>idea, and if it could make it into the Samba distribution. If you
>don't like it then I would implement the SMB protocol module in some
>other way.

Well...hurm.  I'm *not* qualified to talk codebase, but I am, shall we say,
rather creative with my usage of Samba, and so are a few others here who
have tought me much.  So let me offer the following option:

Samba has two properties that make it *extraordinarily* flexible:  One, it
allows config files to include the contents of other files.  Two, it allows
almost universal usage of substitution variables over a *very* wide range.
These combine to mean that one can include the contents of another file
depending upon the properties of the connection environment.

This is all without coding.  I've gotta buy Andrew 'n company a round of
beers sometime for this one.

One of the users in here--Benjamin Kuit, I believe--tweaked me onto a very
interesting fact that extends the previous information even further:  By
mucking with share preexecs(shell scripts run before a share is loaded), one
can process *all* variables simultaneously and use that information to
create a custom configuration file for a given machine, user, etc, all
managable from a unified environment(i.e. Roxen).

STILL, this is all without coding!

There are a few remaining control issues, but the bottom line remains that,
at least for mockup functionality, there's no reason you can't do everything
you want to do in about a day.

And you wonder why MS removed that Knowledge Base article.  Have a nice day
:-)


Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://doxpara.netpedia.net





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