Application of Samba

[Tan, Uko]

Samba Development Team:

We are a data storage solution provider located in Rockville, Maryland, USA and
we are currently investigating the possibility of using Samba in one of our
product offering.

Samba's envisioned role in our application would be that of a NT gateway into
our system.  At the conceptual level, I am wondering if your team has
encountered and witnessed working an interface similar to ours:

Our current system interface is a UNIX user-mode program that takes all
directives from TCP/IP data blocks.  We are looking to upgrade this interface to
accept directives from the file system, eg. "ls
/mountpoint/this_is_an_instruction" would generate an command to our system.
Samba would be responsible for converting such special file requests from NT to
Unix file requests.  A customized Unix file system driver (SUFS) would service
these file system requests and convert them to a format understood by our
user-mode program for further processing.

Would you see any problems in including Samba in this interpretative role? Does
Samba pose any special requirements a UFS driver? Or propagate any requirements
to our application ?

TIA UKO.
utan at filetek.com