Limits on smbclient -M?

Herb Lewis herb at chomps.engr.sgi.com
Tue Feb 2 20:05:04 GMT 1999


Andrew Perrin - Demography wrote:
> 
> Greetings-
> 
> We use smbclient -M to send a Message of the Day to clients every once in
> a while. The clients are NT4 (SP3), and the server is Samba
> 1.9.19-prealpha. However, the same problem appears with version 2.0.0.
> The issue is: once the file to be sent exceeds approximately 675 bytes
> (smbclient reports sending 975 bytes, presumably including some overhead),
> the message turns up blank on the client's screen. that is, a message
> appears but has only an OK button, no text.  Interestingly, the limit on
> the size seems to depend on which host the message comes from and goes to,
> suggesting perhaps that the overhead depends on the length of the
> machines' names.
> 
> man smbclient notes a 1600 byte limit to the message. Does anyone know if
> there's some other (lower) limit that's documented, or if this is just an
> oversight?
> 
> Thanks-
> Andy

>From testing I did, you can only send 973 bytes before you get a blank
message. This is true either from samba or a Windows client running
winpopup. The extra bytes you get when cat'ing a file from UNIX is
a carriage return character added for each "line" in your text.
So, if you have a file that is 5 lines and 100 characters you will
send 105 characters.

-- 
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Herb Lewis                                   Silicon Graphics 
Technical Marketing                          2011 N Shoreline Blvd
Network Systems Division                     Mountain View, CA  94043  
herb at sgi.com                                 Tel: 650-933-2177
http://www.sgi.com                           Fax: 650-932-2177          
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