Confused about samba4 & s3fs

Gémes Géza geza at kzsdabas.hu
Thu Aug 16 23:37:57 MDT 2012


2012-08-16 22:23 keltezéssel, Rowland Penny írta:
> On 16/08/12 20:58, Gémes Géza wrote:
>> 2012-08-16 21:12 keltezéssel, Rowland Penny írta:
>>> On 16/08/12 18:40, Gémes Géza wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Slightly less confused now, as far as I can see, this means that we 
>>> should be running s3fs to serve files (i.e. the smbd daemon) and the 
>>> samba daemon takes care of authentication.
>>>
>>> What I am confused about now is Geza's statement about nmbd, he 
>>> seems to be saying that you can have the server browseable just by 
>>> running the samba daemon, but I have to run the nmbd daemon for the 
>>> server shares to be visible.
>>>
>>> Rowland
>>>
>> On the samba4 install the samba binary listens on the port (137/udp 
>> and 138/udp) nmbd would listen on a samba3 install, however the 
>> samba4 implementation doesn't offer browsing support (yet). Because 
>> of that you can't run nmbd on the host where you run samba4 (unless 
>> you employ tricky virtual interfaces and bind interfaces only 
>> configurations).
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Geza Gemes
>>
>>
> well you have got me really confused now, you say that you can't run 
> nmbd on the samba4 host without pulling tricks. Well because I don't 
> know better, I just started the nmbd daemon on the samba4 server and I 
> can now browse to the visible shares from windows xp and linux 
> clients, just what am I doing wrong ;-)
>
> Rowland
>
>
Please check with netstat -lpn what is listening on that ports.

Regards

Geza Gemes


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