proposal for remotable smb.conf via \winreg pipe

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

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Thanks to air travel and offline imap, I can start to
catch up on email...

tridge at samba.org wrote:

| I've been looking at loadparm from a different
| angle lately. The main problem I see with it from
| an interface view is that it uses a separate function
| per parameter, and the whole codebase assumes that
| lp_*() calls are zero cost.
|
| If we ever want to have our config be stored remotely
| then we need to change both these properties.

Ahh....we are actually talking about different things.
You thought I meant to allow smbd to use a remote smb.conf.
I actually meant to allow admins to edit smb.conf
remotely using a defined interface.

But even that would require some changes to our
configuration structure.  I'm still thinking about
this and watching what Samba 4 does.  For now, this
is an experiment I will place with but would be
a while before it was ever released.  In fact, it
might require too much sweeping changes to even
be releasable.

| So to fix this we would need to call the lp_*() function
| only when a subsystem is initialised, and not call it again
| on that subsystem. So for example, when we get a SMB connection
| we would call a few lp_*() functions to fetch basic parameters
| for that connection and store them in the connection structure.

Yup.  Excellent idea.  I noticed you already made that change.
I'll start looking for specific options store in Samba 3
as well (starting with lp_security()).

| I know this is quite different from your winreg proposal,
| but if revamping of loadparm is on the agenda then I
| think the above should be addressed at the same time.

Yeah.  It's kind of a mess right now.  Granted it's a
working mess.  But the winreg work would probably require
fine grained editing rather than complete file locking.

| We also have the long standing problem of preserving comments in
| smb.conf after automated editing (such as with swat). I think that can
| be done by using a data structure that preserves the parameter
| ordering and attaches the comment lines before the parameter, but I
| think it would best be done at the same time as we ditch the lp_xxx()
| per-parameter access functions and move to string names. If we reduce

Actually, I already did this in python using a similar technique.
It's not really that hard.

See you next week.



cheers, jerry
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