[Samba] Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Steven French]

> A while ago, we disabled it in Fedora kernels, and told people
> "Use CIFS instead".  There were a whole range of Windows variants
> that it couldn't talk to.  Maybe the situation has improved since,
> but at the time, it was bad enough that we had to switch smbfs back on.
>
>       Dave

Not a whole range of Windows servers anymore but Win9x and WinME (as
servers).

Even discounting OS/2, there are still many server variants older than
Windows 2000.  The initial target servers for the cifs vfs client were ones
like Samba, NAS boxes such as Network Appliance, and Windows 2000 or later
servers.  Fortunately the most important of the older servers (at least in
terms of installed base) NT4 server is now supported by cifs vfs.

Surprisingly NT4 still has a huge installed base, and cifs vfs did not
support it reasonably well until version 1.30 of the cifs vfs (which is
less than a year ago).   Win9x/WinME has a large installed base as well,
but is somewhat less important as a server, and would be fairly easy to
support if I added the old "dos" style time conversion routines.  I think
it would take less than two weeks to do (add support for Win9x and WinME to
cifs, a couple missing transact2 infolevels, and turning on the insecure
lanman hash again), but is lower priority than Kerberos support.   Win9x/ME
is so insecure as a server though due to the old now insecure lanman
password hashes, that it is hard to take too seriously but certainly in the
home there are lots of them.


Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com