talloc_tos in shadow_copy2_insert_string

[Andrew Klaassen]

--- On Tue, 3/27/12, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:

> No problem, hope I'm not being too snotty in my replies. Hit
> me with a baseball bat if I am :-).

I'm the one who deserves to be on the business end of a baseball bat here.  And besides, now I can say I've been schooled by Jeremy Allison.  ;-)

What I've been working on is updating media_harmony.c from the BBC's Ingex project from Samba 3.0 to Samba 3.6:

http://ingex.sourceforge.net/MediaHarmony/

The original developer was assigned copyright and released it under the GPL, and my employer has agreed to do the same for me.  The original developer has given his blessing to having me update it (though if he saw this thread he might change his mind :-).

Would there be any interest in/possibility of having it rolled into the Samba project?  What would it take to make that happen?

Background info: Avid is the dominant high-end editing software for film and television (though Adobe's Premiere and Apple's Final Cut have made inroads in recent years).

Part of the legacy from Avid's days as a dedicated-hardware system is that multiple Avid systems do not play nicely together on shared storage.  They overwrite and corrupt each other's database files and interrupt each other's processing.  Fully shared Avid storage with a vanilla Samba server is effectively impossible because of this.

There are solutions to the problem, but they're sold (by the vendor and others) for $40K-$100K USD and up.  There are also workarounds that involve complex arrangements of permissions settings and file copying, but they impede and confuse the workflow as much as they facilitate it.

The media_harmony VFS module is a simple, elegant solution to the problem from the user's point of view.  The small handful of troublesome files are kept separate per client on the server, while each Avid client system sees those files exactly where it expects them to be.

The structure of the module is similar to that of the shadow_copy2 modules: When special paths come in from the client, they're re-written before being passed down to lower VFS layers.

I'm working on updating it in order to hopefully take advantage of some of the performance advances made in Samba and the Linux kernel over the past six years or so since the module was originally written.

> Hi Greg ! Long time no see !

I've passed along the message.  Lately Greg can most often be found in the desk behind me and on the Studio Sysadmins mailing list, which is incidentally home to a whole bunch of Samba users.

Andrew