[Samba] Support for multiple file streams?

[Ephi Dror]

Hello,

 

Look like demand for multiple file streams support increased lately.

 

Does samba 3 series intend to support it any time soon?

 

Look like SAMBA 4 is working on it based on the following form Andrew
Tridgell:

One simple but important example of how the new NTVFS layer helps is the
addition of support for "NT file streams." A file in a NT filesystem can
have multiple "streams," where the primary stream (called ":$DATA") is
the normal file data that people are used to thinking about, but there
can be any number of other named streams containing other types of data,
such as meta-data describing who wrote the file, or an audio stream, or
even some data from an anti-virus scan of the file. Importantly, recent
updates to WindowsXP use streams to store security information about
where a file came from, which allows Windows to display a warning when
you try to execute a file that comes from an untrusted "security zone."
POSIX file systems have no concept of multiple streams, and as Samba was
originally designed as a tool for representing a POSIX filesystem to
Windows clients, there was no attempt to add stream support. The
situation has now changed, with streams becoming a more essential
feature for a file server for Windows clients, and at the same time user
expectations for compatibility with WindowsNT have risen. This means we
really need to support streams, but in order to do that properly, a lot
of the internals of Samba needed to be updated. This is achieved in
Samba4 using the new NTVFS layer, which allows streams to be represented
either using an external database or using "file xattrs," which is an
extension recently added to Linux, and which is also present in a number
of other, Unix-like systems. 

Does anyone aware on any experimental attempt to provide this
functionality in samba 3.0.x or if it is on the roadmap.

Cheers,

Ephi