Help w/fd_ops for SMB

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl at lkcl.net
Tue Dec 16 09:51:19 GMT 2003


> Polling is not really needed for normal files anyway. Feel free to
> submit what you have, it's still useful to have the code, even if it
> needs to be moved somewhere else later on. 

 [fyi on samba-technical, a patch has been submitted to wine
  that implements a netbios name and node status query, _and_
  a full reimplementation of NetServerEnum and NetShareEnum
  has been submitted.]

> And I think most of the
> name lookup etc. can be done in user space, it's only the file I/O
> itself that has to be in the kernel IMO.

no, you definitely don't want to go down that road, trust me.

it's completely unnecessary.

what you _do_ need is to have a proxy daemon that performs
the NetBIOS equivalent of Network Address Translation.

this proxy daemon needs to be used by wine, nmbd and nmblookup
(and no, there's no significant performance penalty for doing so).

the proxy daemon can bind to port 137 and can accept incoming
connections on either a unix domain socket or a high port number
or a shared memory interface.

the simplest version of the proxy daemon is to receive
pre-formatted port 137 requests, look in the packets, modify
the packet id (2 bytes) to a unique (to the daemon) outgoing
number, and using the incoming connection filedescriptor +
the original packet id in a state table.

there you have the basis of the Network Address Translation .


AT A LATER DATE, due consideration can be given to rewriting
the proxy daemon so that it has the "full" original IBM NetBIOS
3.0 API later, at which point adding things like IPX/SPX can
be considered.


please trust me on this one: you do NOT want netbios in the linux
kernel, it's totally unnecessary.  much more benefit can be
achieved, not least portability, by solving the issue in userspace.

l.

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