NetBIOS Names (Was: Re: Directory listing in libsmbclient.so)

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:

> [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> > I must be mistaken... I can't find anything about name limitations on
> > MS-DOS, and rather than assume I remember this correctly, I am going to have
> > to assume that if it was an issue, that it would be in the knowledge base,
> > so lets just work off the assumption that the only limitation with
> > DOS/Windows 3.x is that a space bar is not permitted in the name.  (this
> > because DOS has no way of grouping parameters based on "" within it's
> > standard parsers, since it was never an issue in the past.)
>
> I went digging too, and didn't find a anything other than 15 bytes (16
> minus suffix).  I did find that share names were sometimes limited to 12
> (!?) bytes.

Be sure share names are limited to 12 chars for legacy systems....and
samba. We have discussed this problem with JFM and we found that NT will
consider only max12chars sharenames for servers that does not speak
UNICODE :(

>
> I also ran across the reference to the space character being 'dangerous'.
>
> Digging in the IBM docs, I found one case in which IBM said that, under
> NetBEUI, a name should not start with an asterisk (we knew that) or a nul
> byte.  This latter caught me off guard, but it makes sense.  The odd
> thing is that in IBMs case, they were talking about the name itself
> starting with a nul byte, not the empty string.  If you pass the empty
> string (eg. "\0", in C) you would get:
>
>   CACACACACACACACACACACACACACACAAA
>
> If you force the nul byte to be interpreted as part of the name, you
> would get:
>
>   AACACACACACACACACACACACACACACAAA
>   ^^
>
> Odd.
>
> Chris -)-----
>
>

-- 
Simo Sorce - Integrazione Sistemi Unix/Windows - Politecnico di Milano
E-mail: simo.sorce at polimi.it
Tel.int: 02 2399 2425 - Fax.int. 02 2399 2451
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