smbwall

[Garry J. Garrett]

Torsten Curdt wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > It is good to see that there is someone else who wishes to have this sort
> > of functionality associated with Samba.


Apparently it's already in Samba...  Keith Farrar pointed me to
the "examples" directory where there is a "misc" directory that
has a "wall.perl".  I haven't tested it yet, but it appears to
be the same type of thing that my shell script does, only written
in Perl.  Keith said that it's been included in Samba since 1.9.
I had never looked in "examples" because primarily it seems to
contain examples of configuration files (smb.conf, etc.).


> > A couple of months ago, I implemented and tested something similar, but
> > coded into Samba itself.  My "philosophical" starting point was similar,
> > though not identical, to yours.  I identified three things (there may well
> > be more) where the _easy_ ability to issue such popup message might be
> > useful:
> >
> > 1. the real "wall" command:  e.g. when system "shutdown" alerts
> >    terminal users it also automatically alerts samba users;


My gut reaction to this is, if smbd were to allocate a pseudo terminal
when it starts up, then it would get the "wall" message when it is
sent out and could pass along that wall message as a windows pop-up
message.  Of course, this makes a lot of sense if you run samba as
a stand-alone daemon.  If you run Samba out of inetd, then wouldn't
each instance of smbd that is fired off by inetd end up soaking up
it's own pseudo terminal? (seems wasteful).


> > 2. the ability simply to "write" to a Samba user as one would write to
> >    a terminal user;

If this is your desire, the perhaps it makes sense to allocate a pseudo
terminal per drive mapping?  Then you could send a wall or a issue a
write to the terminal associated with the drive mapping and Samba
would turn around and send it out as a windows pop-up.


> > 3. for future internal use by other parts of "smbd" (e.g. "vfs" routines,
> >    quota warnings, ...).
> >
> > This would assist Garry's "smbwall" command.  Instead of doing "smbstatus"
> > and having to post-process its output, then individually calling
> > "smbclient" for each process (we routinely have over 800), it would simply
> > "write" to all the named pipes (or equivalent) maintained by the smbds
> > themselves.
> >
> > (Note that running an 800+ simultaneous (nearly 20,000 registered) user
> > environment gives different service-support perspectives from that of a
> > small lab.)
> >
> >
> > To the Samba Team:  There are at least two of us who have spotted the
> > usefulness of such functionality, to the extent of actually trying to
> > implement it.  Would it be possible, please, for us to discuss with one of
> > you this idea some more, to obtain a clean, flexible enhancement to Samba
> > for such activity?  (This need not necessarily be on the list, simply to
> > reduce list-noise for others.)
> 
> Me, too!! So we are 3 ;) I have been using such a script, too.
> Unfortunately I had to  throw it away because the smbclient was much too
> slow when sending a pop-up message to W2k machines. We are now running a
> 2.2alpha0 snapshot (and are about to upgrade) and it was still slow - no
> matter what W2k version without any SP, SP1 ,SP2. Is it faster now?
> 
> http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&selm=8F60A507Ftcurdtgmxnet%40130.133.1.4
> http://groups.google.de/groups?q=smbclient+tcurdt&hl=de&selm=8FC3FDDDAtcurdtgmxnet%40130.133.1.4&rnum=1
> 
> Has this changed? A script or even better a smbwall program would be a
> cool tool!
> --
> Torsten

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Garry J. Garrett                                            
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