Directory listing in libsmbclient.so

[Christopher R. Hertel]

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> So the question is, can browsing be defined as a funtion of the smb
> protocol?  Now that I have put some thaught into it beyond the quick replies
> earlier, I would have to say, yes. 

Technically, browsing is built on top of the nbt (NetBIOS over TCP/IP)
protocol.  It uses the NetBIOS Name Service and the NetBIOS Datagram
Service.  It does not use either the NetBIOS Session Service or SMB.  That
is why reading a browse list is essentially an overloading of the smb://
URI. 

> Because smb w/o netbios is no longer smb, but rather CIFS.

Yes, that is one way to look at it.  I personally agree with the
distinction.  W2K SMB (aka CIFS) uses port 445 while NBT uses UDP/137,
UDP/138, and UDP/139.  Even though the SMB messages themselves are very
similar (the same in most cases), I would agree that smb:// and cifs://
are distinct. 

> So if SMB is specific to the netbios service, then
> it's probably acceptable to say that workgroup browsing is part of SMB.

That's the overloading we are doing.

> So
> with that, I reject my previous comments, and position on the use of nmb://
> or nbbs://, becase netbios is required by SMB, so it would not be wrong to
> wrap it up into one overloaded protocol.  Afterall, we don't use a dns://
> protocol to browse dns zones....
> 
> Sorry to flip flop so quickly, but such is the life of a busy thread.. :)

Yes, and an interesting conversation.  These issues are certainly not 
obvious and do require careful thought.

What a long, strange thread it's been.

Chris -)-----

-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
crh at nts.umn.edu              Networking and Telecommunications Services

    Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them
    with your hands...you choose them as your guides, and following
    them you will reach your destiny.  --Carl Schultz