[Samba] Functionality of Nmbd at Active Directory mode of Samba4 !

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 12:09:02PM +0000, Rowland penny wrote:
> 
> Obviously to you, the lack of network browsing is a big deal, to others, it
> is just not that important. There are things required that take priority
> over this, so until one of the main developers (or more likely, their
> employer) require it, network browsing will probably not get 'fixed'. If you
> can fix it, you will need to supply patches against samba-master to either
> samba-technical or https://github.com/samba-team/samba

So here's the deal. Getting network browing right
is hard and dangerous (security-wise) and is a
solved problem with nmbd. That code hasn't needed
security updates in a few years (which I'm very
glad of, as I wrote most of it :-).

Now, when Samba-AD was being developed, everything
was originally being re-written. This has since been
discovered to be A.Bad.Idea.

But this means some functionality that isn't in
stable nmbd got put into the Samba-ad code (mostly
the WINS replication stuff).

These days few people depend on network browsing on AD-DC's
to work, so the situation (some parts being in
nmbd, some parts being elsewhere) remains.

To break the logjam, funding needs to be found
to finish the browsing code in the AD-DC, or
to add the extra functionality to nmbd (my
preferred solution, as that is simpler code).

But it isn't going to happen without someone
who *needs* this stepping up and funding it
or donating working code.

Jeremy.