a proposal for Samba 3.5

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 12:29:13AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> > Even if "net" was/became a full replacement of rpcclient, the removal
> > of rpcclient would break a lot of existing (CUPS) installations, if
> > Samba was upgraded.
> 
> i created a series of commands from the base rpcclient functionality.
> 
> net, lsa, rpcclient, samedit, regedit, cmdat - you get the picture.
> 
> each of these commands was a subset of the base rpcclient capability,
> where each command pretty much looked after testing of a single 
> DCE/RPC pipe - samedit looked after \PIPE\samr for example.
> 
> i presume that the net command under discussion is not the same
> "net" command as the one created in 1999 / 2000.

The 'net' command here is the that exists in the Samba 3.0 tree,
written initially by jmcd, and is used to provide administrator useful
functionality, such as 'net join' (which invokes ADS or RPC methods as
appropriate to join Samba to a domain).  Net intends to provide a
long-term stable interface to these common operations.  

Originally 'net' intended to provide a very similar interface to the
WinNT command of the same name, but this is not strictly adheared too.

For CUPS, which wishes to upload a win32 client driver to a Samba
server for windows 'point and print', there needs to be a way for it
to execute these remote RPC commands.  This was done by calling
rpcclient in the past, I expect it to call 'net printer' (or something
similar) in future.

If CUPS backwared compatability remains a big issue when the 3.1 code
actually gets to a 3.2 release, I'm sure a small script can create the
short-term shim required.

Andrew Bartlett