Print Share Name Length

[Jacco de Leeuw]

> Tell us if you want 8 character length limited print share
> names or larger. If we were to remove this limitation and allow
> more than 8 characters then we will get complaints from some
> users who use older SMB clients (eg: old WfW, Older DOS
> clients, etc.).

Mangle the sharename? (See below).

I maintain a webpage about using these older clients with Samba,
http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~leeuw/samba/dos.html
(because nobody else seems to -- BTW, Paul B., if you're reading
this: it has still not been added to the Samba Homepage!).
So I feel I'll have to jump in to take the stand for those
users... :-)

The 2 DOS clients I tried (MS Client and LanMan) indeed seem to
have this 8 character limit. Browsing those printer shares does
not seem to have that limit. If you bypass the /etc/printcap
support in Samba and add printers manually to smb.conf, the
longer sharenames happily show up if you do a NET VIEW on those
clients. However, the problem is of course that NET USE gives an
error.

The various OS/2 clients seem to have a 20 character limit, but
the most recent ones (Warp Connect and Warp 4) come with full LPR
support, so it should not be that much of a problem.

I would hate to exclude all these users from using Samba
printers. Not everbody runs Windows, you know. And not every user
reads this mailing list. Just search with Dejanews for "DOS" in
combination with "Samba". I believe there are quite some DOS
users out there!

We should not overestimate the importance of the sharename
length. If you need a long description, why not use the Comments
field?

On the other hand, I agree the 8 character limit *is* confusing
("why don't they show up in the browse list?!"). But at least
it forces sysadmins to reduce the length, thereby accomodating
users with older clients. If you remove the limit, sysadmins
would probably not be much inclined to shorten the name, and the
user with the older client is going to be the one who is
confused. In such situations, I tend to give the users the
advantage, and not the sysadmin...

As a compromise, wouldn't it be possible to mangle the sharename,
depending on the remote_arch? Most of the code should already
be there, in mangle.c.

Jacco
-- 
Jacco de Leeuw |Fac.Phys,Math.&Comp Sc. |mailto:leeuw at wins.uva.nl
J.C. van Wessemstr. 54 |University of Amsterdam| +31(0)756352068
1501VM Zaandam Holland |http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~leeuw/
        Jean-Luc Picard did more for bald men than toupets do...