SNIA CIFS TR
Christopher R. Hertel
crh at ubiqx.mn.org
Tue Jul 30 09:02:02 GMT 2002
Mike: I share your frustration, but I also know how much work went
into getting the doc where it is. Send me comments and I'll
collect them. There will be a workgroup meeting at the CIFS
conference and, as far as I know, the #1 agenda item is work
toward a V2 version of the doc.
Abartlet: Mike is the lead coder for jCIFS. He and I work together quite
a lot. He has more than his fair share of clue.
Mike: Abartlet is the Samba Team's authorization guru. I've been
digging at him for answers on NTLMv2 and SPNEGO and such. He
also has more than his fair share of clue.
I'm glad you two have met. :) I should mention that my first experience
with the Samba Team was a flame war. Not that this is anything like a
flamewar...it's a good, heated discussion. I like that.
On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 08:24:48PM +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> "Michael B.Allen" wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 30 Jul 2002 18:58:16 +1000
> > Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> >
> > > "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?
Microsoft was on the Workgroup. I believe that was done by request, but
you're right that Leach and Naik deserve credit.
I'll mention that I e'mailed Naik to get permission to include the expired
draft in the printed version of my book, but did not hear back. Dang.
> > > > This document is a big turd. There are major grammatical errors,
Yes. These need to be fixed. Abartlet and I, among others, have already
started sending in corrections.
> > > > technical inaccuracies, and huge holes that aren't even mentioned
> > > > (what's the number of seconds between 1601 and 1970 again?). How
Yep. A lot of this needs to be filled in. (BTW, if someone has that
number please let me know so that I can include it in my book.)
> > > > 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.
Actually, that's changed (long story). It's not a proposed standard any
more. For the same reasons you cite, it's now a Technical Reference.
This has been brought to the attention of the current keeper of the doc.
That blurb above probably dates back to the motivation that drove
Microsoft to publish an Internet Draft in the first place: competition
with WebNFS.
> > > > 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?
Oooh.. Interesting. Is there code to test this? :)
> > > > There's *nothing* about DCE/RPC in here
> > > > except for some incomprehensible banter about PDUs.
Yes. This is a known and major problem with SMB/CIFS.
> > > Much as we would like to have DCE/RPC documented, it's a lot of work.
> >
> > So why confuse the Transactions section with some awkward bit about PDUs? I
> > can't believe there isn't someone out there that could write a nice little
> > intro about DCE/RPC. And the other bit about Transactions is from an old
> > leach draft. They (leach) got the IETF version number mixed up. This was
> > discussed on MS CIFS list but I guess no one from the WG was listening.
...so the SNIA doc is based on the wrong version of the Leach/Naik draft,
do I follow correctly?
> Well, I think the lack of RPC stuff is more becouse MS doesn't want it
> documented in anything they are associated with - and those involved are
> still trying to keep MS in the process.
>
> > > > The only stuff that's
> > > > accurate is the original Leach/Naik content.
> > >
> > > My understanding is that even that isn't too flash.
> >
> > Sure it has it's little inconsistencies. Unicode is hosed in info level
> > 0x105's, Unicode is seriously screwed between Win98 and NT (e.g. short
> > names in TRANS2_FIND_FIRST/NEXT), and so on but these are exactly the
> > things I hoped would be sorted out. The new content in the SNIA doc is just
> > not reality. Someone was seriously in denial. The part about "Protocol
> > version negotiation"? How many servers do you think actually make decisions
> > based on what dialect is negotiated? Probably Windows and that's it because
> > the code was there already. But there are enough incompatabilities between
> > servers that new dialects are warranted. Why isn't there as "NT LM 0.12
> > WIN98"? There needs to be some emperical analysis before a "standard" can
> > be drafted.
>
> Sorry, I don't quite see what you mean. Samba certainly uses the agreed
> dialect to determine many things - in particular the provision of NT1
> only SessionSetup etc. Sure, there should be new dialects - but until
> MS starts matching on the *protocol strings* there isn't any point
> 'defining' a new dialect.
>
> An addition to the document explaining what packets particular
> clients/server can/will exchange would be a useful improvement.
Okay, this has me interested. You're saying that the dialect string has
little impact on the behavior of the server... is that right? From what I
can see, the best bet for new client code (and what Mike does in jCIFS) is
to limit the client to NT LM 0.12, and work out the quirks within that.
OS/2, DOS, and WfWG 3.11 servers would not be usable, but that's a
dwindling set of systems nowdays.
> > > > The few corrections I
> > > > submitted have not been fixed so why bother to contibute anything?
Get them to me and I'll keep track of the list, and see what I can get
done. The source of the doc is MS-Word, which is a problem, but I can
work with the workgroup on changes.
> > > > 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.
Yes, the Unix extensions are actually worth-while. I think that the Mac
extensions should be reviewed too. Dave is popular product, and Apple
have their own implementation now (though I'm not sure if it would want
Unix extensions, Mac extensions, or both).
> > I find it hard to believe NFS is that much worse.
>
> It's the user/host authenticated bit that gets poeple.
That's an interesting point that has been intriguing me for a while. NFS
expects that its "shares" will be mounted on the client by root, and that
(the client being a multi-user system) system-wide access rules will
apply. CIFS assumes that shares will be accessed by the user. A
different paradigm.
> > > > 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
> >
> > This is such a crappy argument. I file this one with the "if you don't like
> > it, submit a patch" argument. If someone writes some code that does X, the
> > chances of someone else, possibly much more capable, of also writing code
> > to do X decreases greatly. So now the SNIA comes up with a crappy document
> > (nice formatting; too bad it's a MS Word doc) and another group that might
yeah
> > have formed a real working group that would turn out to do some good
> > research, generate dependency graphs, maintain a bug database, etc has now
> > gone off and done something else instead.
>
> So? But this is the document the CIFS community is working with - and
> it really is the best we have - despite its' defficiencies.
Andrew: There was talk at the last CIFS conference about putting up a
"wiki" (sp?) for comments on the document. Do you know what happened to
that? I think that such a thing is exactly what we need. I see Mike's
point, that it can be frustrating to try and get changes made. I'm
involved with the workgroup and I can see all of the machinery churning,
so I suppose I'm not as surprised that changes take time.
> As to 'why SNIA'? Well, SNIA puts on the annual CIFS conference, and MS
> is a member. Given the need for MS participation in an forum that
> seriously attempts to document the protocol, and the need for a vender
> neutral body, I can certainly understand SNIA's role
...and there is the chance to comment outside the SNIA. I really would
like to have that wiki thing...
> > > give Chris's site a look - his online book is a very worthwhile read:
> > >
> > > http://www.ubiqx.org/cifs/index.html
> >
> > I'm very familar with this work. I'm excited to see Chris has moved past
> > NetBIOS and I try to help him and encourage him to document the quirks like
> > his interest in mappings of NT and DOS error/status codes. Just yesterday I
> > helped clairify UTF-16 vs. UCS-2LE. Guess what the SNIA docs says about
> > character encoding? Putting a UTF-16 CIFS server on the Internet sounds
> > like a great idea.
>
> Chis was chasing the UTF-16 issue becouse I flagged it with him. Chris
> does a very good job keeping on top of these 'little details'.
You two, along with Tridge, are probably my top resources right
now--Thanks!
Chris -)-----
--
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/ -)----- Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/ -)----- ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/ -)----- crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/ -)----- crh at ubiqx.org
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