[PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6]

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Saturday 2010-07-31 21:03, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>On Sat, 2010-07-31 at 12:41 -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>> On 2010-07-30, at 12:11, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>> > Your Mac has a perfectly functional CIFS client, as do your Linux boxes.
>> > They both interoperate just fine with Samba, and would presumably
>> > continue to do so if someone were to decide to reuse the ctime field on
>> > your Samba box as storage for a create time.
>> 
>> CIFS doesn't support symlinks (they just appear as the referenced file), so I've had applications that scan the filesystem recurse indefinitely due to symlinked directories on a CIFS share appearing as hard-linked directories on the client.  This doesn't happen when the filesystem is accessed via NFS.
>
>Sigh... So please explain how it would be useful to export that
>particular filesystem through _both_ CIFS and NFS?

Seems like a reasonable case for, say, a public "ftp server". For
example, I keep ftp5.gwdg.de:/ftp/pub mounted, that's a little more
convenient than always having to start an ftp cilent.

Conversely, since NFS is, well, non-existent on Windows, one would
use CIFS there (had it ftp5 opened) to get the same convenience.