[Samba] Samba as a portable userland FS basis?

[Tobias Oberstein]

Recently, I looked at some options implementing unusual file systems
in userland.

On Linux, there is LUFS and similar stuff which frees one from touching
any kernel code. The design is always similar: a generic kernel module
forwards calls to a user level daemon and forwards returned results
back.  The user level daemon implements or serves as a basis for
unusual user land filesystem implmentation.

However, LUFS is not available on Windows and I'm not aware of
somehting similar ..

So I've looked after an alternative for LUFS portable across at least 
over Windows and Linux and probably POSIX, *BSD and MacOSX. I did not
found anything .. my conclusion was, that one has to go e.g. and use
the "MS Installable File Systems Development Kit" and build a kernel
mode driver which forwards calls to a user mode daemon (pretty much
the LUFS design). I'm unwilling to take that level of pain.

Next idea was to use the Samba _server_ code as a basis to built
the unusual FS on top and just run the Samba server colocated/locally
on the desktop machine. Great reuse.

Here are the two main questions:

  1. Is it possible to build/run the Samba _server_ on Windows
     (e.g. using Cygwin)?

  2. Is there a "reasonable" internal API within the Samba server
     which could be used to stack unusual FS stuff on top?

Generally, IMHO it would be great to have an open standard C API to
some portable user land daemon to implement portable user land
file systems.

Cheers,
Tobias