cifs vfs - step by step improvements to better support legacy
servers - and also recent ones
Guenter Kukkukk
samba at kukkukk.com
Sat Mar 8 06:28:56 GMT 2008
In the past, users were able to decide whether to use the smbfs.ko or the
cifs.ko kernel module.
Samba now has removed the smbfs userland helper applets
- smbmount
- smbmnt
- smbumount
and the kernel side of smbfs will be removed very soon.
Some linux distros (debian/ubuntu, ...) have already started to
provide "fake" versions of smbmount and smbumount, which
_simply_ just mount cifs instead of smbfs.
To me, such an approach is "just silly and stupid" - and samba
should _not_ support such a mess inside their source tree.
The assumption, that cifs can easily replace smbfs - and only
fumbling with some different calling parameters would be
enough - is just WRONG!
Smbfs has been written, when lots of (todays) legacy servers
(DOS, win9x/me,OS/2, ...) needed support - and new
winNT had to be implemented.
Cifs was a "completely new design", supporting only
- NT LM 0.12
- POSIX 2
From the beginnings - no legacy support at all !
Years ago smbfs was "said to be dying" - which raised
the pressure on cifs to "also support former legacy servers",
similar to smbfs.
Cifs has been improved to support "smbfs supported
features" - but atm is failing lots of smbfs supported
functionality"!
I hope, that ALL distro maintainers now tell their customers,
that smbfs and _all_ samba related helpers have been
gone now!
And please stop writing silly "wrappers" .... which do not match reality.
SMBFS != CIFS
Leftover are only "mount.cifs" and "umount.cifs" .
I'm really sure, that cifs can be improved to also support the currently
missing smbfs functionality for legacy servers! :-)
Have lots of modifications waiting here - step by step.
Cheers, Günter
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