Running Samba (smbd fileserver) on Windows!

[Garming Sam]

I have a proof of concept of smbd running on Bash on Windows.

https://www.samba.org/~garming/

It's just running as guest, with a few hacks but it appears I can
transfers files to and from the share running inside the Windows Linux
subsystem. The fact that it mostly just works is quite scary.

What's also interesting is that Samba actually fills one of the obvious
shortcomings of the system as it is right now. While you can expose the
C:/ drive on Windows to the internal Linux system, the converse is not
true. The Linux files store their additional information as extended
attributes and so modifying them on Windows easily destroys or corrupts
this information. But if you have Samba, you can now display a logical
view over SMB.

I'm not sure about how well it performs, but it's almost certainly going
to be better than anything like Cygwin. If it's at the point where Samba
can sort of run on it, who knows what else it could do. The fact
Microsoft are the ones who effectively got smbd running on Windows is a
bit topsy-turvy but I guess that is the world right now.


Cheers,

Garming