Current status of WMI support in Samba 4

[Michael Sievers]

Because of the doubtful status and future of WMI support in Samba we 
decided to go one step ahead and try openwsman. Starting with XP/2003 
server Microsoft released WinRM, a WS-Man implementation, exposing WMI 
over SOAP.

On client side we are evaluating the usage of the openwsman client 
library to communicate with Hyper-V on a Windows host. In fact we are 
doing WMI but over SOAP instead of DCOM.

As I mentioned, this is what we intend to do. It is not for sure, if it 
is possible to control Hyper-V completely using WinRM/openwsman, but it 
seems to be an interesting topic.

Cheers,
Michael Sievers

Andrew Bartlett schrieb:
> On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 09:04 +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>> On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 13:03 +0200, Michael Sievers wrote:
>>> Hi !
>>>
>>> The Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing currently evaluates the 
>>> possibility of contributing a Hyper-V driver to the libvirt project. 
>>> Hyper-V uses WMI as its primary API. Searching the web for a way using 
>>> WMI from Linux showed us that there is a Samba 4 based WMI command line 
>>> client in Ubuntu, based on Samba 4 (TP4). But TP4 is rather old, so I 
>>> searched the mailing list archiv for mails concerning current WMI 
>>> support. Last thing I noticed was an announcement of alpha 6, mentioned 
>>> that WMI supported was reintegrated, but not as functional as before.
>>>
>>> My question is how functional is WMI support in current samba 4 alpha 7 
>>>   Is it usable ? How can I enable it ? I downloaded alpha 7 and tried to 
>>> build the wmic/wmis tools, but didn't find an appropriate configure nor 
>>> makefile option.
>> Sadly the WMI development occured in a private fork of Samba4 just after
>> we removed the DCOM code on which it relied from the distribution.  We
>> found out about it only months later, after the packages landed in
>> Debian.
>>
>> It has taken a lot of effort (and there are some other blockers) to get
>> the support back into Samba4.   Ask Jelmer for the details.
> 
> Should you wish to develop on this, I would look at the com branch in 
> 
> git://git.samba.org/jelmer/samba.git 
> 
> and the wmi branch in
> 
> git://git.samba.org/jelmer/samba4.git
> 
> But I don't know the status more than that.  Jelmer can perhaps
> elaborate on the status of that code, and what needs to be done before
> it can be merged.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett