Directory listing in libsmbclient.so

[Christopher R. Hertel]

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> IIRC correctly, "." is a valid character for domains, I seem to remember
> working on a domain (workgroup) that was the same as my dns domain.. In
> fact, now that I think about it, I remember working on several domains that
> were like this at client sites.  But what about using this format...
> 
> smb://[workgroup[:scope]/]

The colon is also a legitimate character in a NetBIOS name, so you have
the same problem.  In fact, RFC 1001/1002 place only two restrictions on 
NetBIOS names:

1) They must be no more than 16 characters long.
2) They may not begin with an asterisk ('*').

That's it.  The only solution is to escape the 'bad' characters.  I don't 
know of any other way.  This will work as well for a dot as it will for a 
colon or '@' or what-have-you.  There is precedent for this as well.

Regarding the dot... It is actually better than something like a colon 
because Windows/NT4 discourages its use in a NetBIOS name to some 
extent.  NT will assume that a name containing a dot is a DNS name.

> The scope is a logical organizer.  The scope breaks up the querries to only
> names listed under the specified scope.  This can be used for several
> purposes.  

Basically, though, the NBT system as set out in RFC1001/1002 is a system
for creating a virtual NetBIOS LAN on top of a routed internetwork.  The
Scope ID field was intended to allow you to name the vLANs and thus create
more than one over the same IP space.  If implemented correctly, a given
workstation could actually have been a member of multiple scopes, each
appearing as a virtual LANA (LAN adapter). 

> Suppose you have to departments, and they should not be able to
> querry each others names, but they are within the same workgroup, or
> security domain. The scope allows you to seperate them, so that if you don't
> know the scope, you can't querry the name.  The problem is that microsoft
> only supports one scope per machine.  So a computer can't participate in
> multiple scopes, which leave the scopes functionality, at more of a
> security/segregation type function. 

Good description.

> With scopes, you can have multple
> workgroups, all sharing the same netbios name space,

Well, sharing the same IP space...

> but clients can only
> querry the systems registered within the same scope as they are in.  In this
> way, you have broken up the one namespace into several logical namespaces.

Right.

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