Query-info passthrough for linux smb

[Steve French]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 9:14 PM ronnie sahlberg via samba-technical
<samba-technical at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 7:03 AM Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 05:55:34AM +1000, ronnie sahlberg via samba-technical wrote:
> > > List, all
> > >
> > > PSA, and fishing for people to write some python code...
> > >
> > >
> > > In the kernel client land we now have an ioctl to provide query info passthrough
> > > between the application and the smb2/3 server.
> > > This allows userland applications to view all the SMB2/3 metadata that
> > > are available via
> > > SMB2/QUERY_INFO.
> > >
> > > We even have some simple example code to show how the API looks like
> > > when querying for example the security descriptor or quota.
> > >
> > > It would be really awesome to have linux applications with a gui to
> > > view or manage these things instead of having to revert to using other
> > > OSes everytime we want to view these data.
> > >
> > > Anyone up for writing some nice, maybe python, tools to view and
> > > operate on security descriptors?
> > > I think having something similar to what you have in
> > > Properties/Security/... in Explorer would be awesome.
> >
> > Really cool work Ronnie - thanks ! That will be
> > amazingly useful in future.
>
> Thanks for the praise.
>
> Aside from just being able to get hold of the metadata for files,
> since this as far as the kernel is concerned this is
> just an opaque blob in / opaque blob out interface it can allow us to
> do even more exotic stuff.
> Say, like inventing a new private infolevel and basically have an
> authenticated transport to talk directly to a samba vfs module
> from client application space.  I am likely getting way ahead of
> myself here, but I could see a lot more exotic and cool
> use we can have from this feature.

Agreed - very cool, and already useful.  I am looking forward
to similar value from pass through ioctl --> smb3 fsctl from userspace
to get useful debugging/stats information - and additional metadata.


-- 
Thanks,

Steve