CIFS VFS posted

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Thu Jun 20 14:28:05 GMT 2002


Steven French wrote:
> 
> Good question - at some point I need to look at that.   Clearly the
> structure is quite a bit different between the two.  Most visibly the mount
> code is in kernel in mine (I have no mount helper yet as smbfs does - I was
> planning on adding some tcp name to ip address resolution code in the Samba
> utility "net" though so it could do a "net use" more gracefully).  I
> noticed that smbfs is getting some activity - e.g. I saw that Unicode
> patches were added to smbfs so that is no longer a difference between the
> two.    Another difference is that I have hardlink support -  to be precise
> I added native Windows hardlink support in the cifs vfs and 1/2 implemented
> symbolic links (via windows style reparse points - the reparse points are
> detected but the follow link is not working).    I don't implement the Unix
> extensions yet  but will - I had focused on finding Windows equivalents for
> the Unix extensions which is harder than it sounds but important since
> Windows does not implement the Unix extensions.
> 
> A few other differneces - the cifs vfs uses native ip addresses and either
> 445 or the RFC1001 port rather than netbios naming as smbfs's helper uses.

smbfs is port-agnostic.  smbmount just uses normal samba code for the
tree connect, and as such already has support for both 139 and 445
semantics.

> smbfs is quite a bit more stable and has reasonable backlevel
> interoperability (which is not a goal of the cifs vfs).   The cifs vfs is
> designed only for those compliant with the SNIA CIFS Technical Reference or
> later to simplify the testing and maximize the Linux->Samba and
> Linux->Windows2000/XP/.NetServer function.    I had hoped that in some
> sense it could serve as a "reference implementation" for the SNIA
> specification.   Over time function between the two will probably diverge
> quite a bit more.    I wanted to be much more aggressive in adding function
> and in design risks in the cifs vfs (ie more aggressive than I guessed we
> would be able to do in the smbfs which people rely on today to be stable)
> e.g. in adding function such as access control and Kerberos integration.

Apart from the 'sombody killed my conn' issue, the issue that prevents
kerberos intergration in smbfs is NTSTATUS support - again, becouse it
uses the samba mount-time helper.

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




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