SNIA CIFS TR

[Andrew Bartlett]

"Michael B.Allen" wrote:
> 
> Don't  you  think  it's  kind  of  funny  that  Leach  and Naik aren't even
> mentioned in the acknowledgements? And they put a Copyright 2001, 2002 SNIA
> in  there? This document is a big turd. There are major grammatical errors,
> technical  inaccuracies,  and huge holes that aren't even mentioned (what's
> the  number of seconds between 1601 and 1970 again?). How about this gem on
> page 1:
> 
>     "Adoption  of  a  common  file sharing protocol having modern semantics
>     such  as  shared  files,  byte-range  locking, coherent caching, change
>     notification, replicated storage, etc. would provide important benifits
>     to the Internet community."

Unfortunetly the politics SNIA require its current status as a 'proposed
standard', but anyway.

> What  a load of crap! Who's going to run a CIFS server on the internet? DCE
> on  top  of  Transactions  on  top  of SMB in front of empty 4 byte NetBIOS
> headers?  No  thanks!  Don't  you  think  it would be worth mentioning that
> SMB_COM_COPY  doesn't  even  work?  There's *nothing* about DCE/RPC in here
> except  for  some incomprehensible banter about PDUs. 

Much as we would like to have DCE/RPC documented, it's a lot of work.

> The only stuff that's
> accurate  is  the  original  Leach/Naik  content.  

My understanding is that even that isn't too flash.

> The  few  corrections  I
> submitted  have  not  been  fixed so why bother to contibute anything? This
> document  is an excuse for the different shadowy clicks to get their little
> two-bit  extensions in. And the funny thing is the extensions will never be
> implemented  by Windows servers so they're nearly pointless. 

Nearly, but not quite.  Such extenstions do exist, and they may as well
be publicly documented - not everybody runs windows, and sometimes the
extenstions provide some quite useful features.   Samba->Samba
connections are quite common on small networks trying to avoid the
perils of NFS for example.

> I wish someone
> would do a real analysis and write some practical documentation.

A volenteer!  Great!  I'll see what help I can be, but you might want to
give Chris's site a look - his online book is a very worthwhile read:

http://www.ubiqx.org/cifs/index.html

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net