Confused about samba4 & s3fs

[Gémes Géza]

2012-08-16 19:22 keltezéssel, Rowland Penny írta:
> On 16/08/12 15:10, Arvid Requate wrote:
>> maybe I should have explained more clearly, that s3fs is a service of
>> the samba process that avoids the need to start the smbd separately
>> and provides all the internal wiring necessary to authenticate against
>> the samba backend. AFAIK s3fs efetively runs the same codebase as
>> smbd. So you have to differentiate between three thigs here: first the
>> "old style" of running smbd as a separate process, second the
>> improved convenience of "s3fs" that runs/forks mostly the same code
>> automatically from the samba process itself. And finally the "NTvfs"
>> fileserver code, which AFAIK is based on an initiative mainly of 
>> Tridge to
>> write a fileserver from scratch with an improved internal structure. The
>> NTvfs code is still in source4, but it is not the default (as of 
>> beta1) as
>> it is still in early stages of development and feature completeness as
>> compared to the smbd/s3fs code.
>>
>> Cheers,
> Sorry I am still confused, I know that if you now start the samba4 
> daemon you also get the smbd daemon, you can start the nmbd daemon to 
> get network browsing. As far as I can see, all of this works, so I ask 
> again, do I use s3fs so it can be tested or not?
>
> If testing is not required, why was all the effort put into adding 
> s3fs to samba4?
>
> Rowland
>
No the services offered by nmbd in a Samba3 installation are offered by 
the samba binary on a Samba4 install, s3fs means (in a simplified 
manner) load the Samba3 smbd for serving files. The user facing benefit 
of using s3fs instead of ntvfs is, that Samba3s smbd (and thus s3fs) has 
received lots of improvements (like support for newer smb/cifs dialects 
used by Vista/7) which didn't were ported to ntvfs.

Regards

Geza Gemes