CIFS UNIX Extensions.

Jeremy Allison jra at samba.org
Wed Jan 9 17:27:41 GMT 2002


On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 05:37:38PM -0700, Jay Ts wrote:
> Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > > 
> > > I'm getting ready to add the CIFS UNIX extensions - this is code that
> > > has been in HP's CIFS/9000 product and is designed to give (almost)
> > > full UNIX -> UNIX semantics to CIFS (fcntl locking is still missing
> > > I'm afraid).
> > > 
> > > Please take a look w.r.t. using these extensions in Linux smbfs,
> > > as it might make the job of smbfs much easier.
> > 
> > This is excellent news!
> 
> If I understand correctly, then I heartily agree.  Are you saying
> these extensions allow Samba servers and clients talk to each other
> and support a full Unix filesystem, with permissions, owner and group,
> modification times, etc.?  (I.e., "just like nfs"?) This is something
> that I've been hoping would be added to Samba, as it would allow the
> possiblity of working around limitations in Microsoft's networking
> technology and limitations to functionality that result from protocols
> that are too difficult to reverse engineer.
> 
> Recently I've been using smbfs on Linux, and it's at a stage of
> development now that makes it really cool to use. I haven't seen
> any bugs yet in the 2.2.2 release, and aside from the odd translations
> between Windows and Unix filesystem attributes, it is essentially
> transparent.  Good stuff.

Yes, this is exactly what HP did in CIFS/9000 (their Samba product).
Now I'm working for HP I'm merging all that code into the mainline &
doing portability fixes (for obvious reasons HPUX was the main priority
for getting everything working).

This new code should make the job of smbfs much easier to get UNIX
semantics. The only missing piece is a CIFS interface to the POSIX
fcntl calls.

That's quite hard - to make it match all the CIFS interactions also,
and I'm still thinking about it.

Jeremy.




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