Large Write_Andx messages

[Mikael Klamra]

HI,
Thanks for the tips. I'm giving up on using batched WRITE_ANDX
messages since it apparently doesn't work properly on Windows.

I have not confused the CAP_LARGE_* bits and batched messages. They
are related. My original question concerned how to batch WRITE_ANDX
messages for Windows servers. Windows Server 2003 seems to have some
support for this. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have managed to
batch two WRITE_ANDX messages and send the batched message to a
Windows server without errors. However, my experiments show that this
only works when the total size of the batch message is less than about
4700 bytes. When the total size is larger, the server returns an
error. It thus seems that Windows supports batched WRITE_ANDX
messages, but only if the total message size is small. The server
returns an error even if I set the CAP_LARGE_* bits to indicate that I
want to use messages that are up to 64 KB.

Mikael



On Oct 30, 2007 5:43 PM, Michael B Allen <ioplex at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/29/07, Mikael Klamra <mklamra at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was asking about chained WRITE_ANDX messages.
>
> Hi Mikael,
>
> I played around a lot with chaining in the early days. JCIFS can
> actually chain any messages together to any degree provided that it
> makes sense to do so. But aside from chaining the
> SMB_COM_SESSION_SETUP_ANDX with SMB_COM_TREE_CONNECT_ANDX it was all a
> useless exercise as it was found that Windows servers do not support
> chaining much at all. There are a few other messages that can be
> chained but I have never seen more that two messages in a chain work.
>
> However, there's a much more compelling reason not to mess around with
> chaining. I follow a general rule when working with MS
> implementations: Do not do anything you do not see Windows do. The
> rationale is that MS is not known for third party support through
> strict conformance to standards and as such your implementation may
> yield inconsistent results with different server versions. Or support
> for it could completely disappear in a future version. If you mimic MS
> behavior precisely, you know that your implementation will work as
> long as MS needs to support the implementation you are mimicking. Or,
> in this particular case, ever worse you could corrupt data on the
> server trying to chain or pipeline writes.
>
> I get a WireShark capture of a Win32 or .NET test program and copy
> that exactly. Anything else is unsafe.
>
> Mike
>