IPX transport (was: Re: NetBIOS-free SMB protocol on port 445 in Windows 2000/XP)

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 01:09:31AM +0200, Rafal Szczesniak escreveu:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:
> 
> > Even Novell are giving up on IPX.
> 
> Yeah, I know. A few people asked me on a linux user group
> meeting whether it was planned. They meant election issues
> in Win9x network where clients have IPX installed as well as
> TCP/IP, by default.
> 
> > There was talk once of trying to implement NetBEUI but I haven't heard
> > anything about that in a long while.
> 
> I heard that, too.

Well, I'm working on porting the NetBEUI and 802.2 LLC stacks that procom
released under the GPL for the 2.0.36 version of the Linux kernel, I have
it sortof working with samba 2.0.6 and kernel 2.4.9, now I'm buried alive
trying to make it SMP safe, which in turn can get rid of races present in
the UP code as well. The patch for samba 2.0.6 is full of #ifdefs for
NetBEUI support and for the patch to be accepted Tridge suggested making
samba to have NBT separated from SMB, with a per transport set of
functions, much like the VFS or other subsystems in the Linux kernel, which
I agree and hope to find time to implement in samba. This in turn will make
it easier to have other transports, like IPX, that I also plan to do, as
I'm the current IPX maintainer for Linux stack, but hey, the day has only
24 hours and I have to do "real work" too 8)

Current patches at:

Samba:
http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/patches/wip/samba_netbeui.patch.CURRENT

NetBEUI + 802.2:
http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/patches/wip/netbeui+8022.patch.CURRENT

and I also have it under CVS at:

http://cvs.conectiva.com.br/kernel-acme

to retrieve the latest (currently with some problems) snapshot:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.conectiva.com.br:/home/cvs rdiff -r HEAD -r
netbeui_2_4_9 kernel-acme

Jay Schullist, that also had done work in the past in another NetBEUI
implementation for Linux and has another 802.2 implementation is currently
looking at moving to the stack I'm working (he dropped his work on
NetBEUI), so if everything goes well, we'll speed up development and reach
something stable to submit for inclusion in the Linux kernel.

Testers are more than welcome, patches are much more welcome 8)

I've been reporting the advance of the work in
http://advogato.org/person/acme

- Arnaldo