[Samba] The sad state of samba 4 adaption for home/small business routers.

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2016-03-11 at 17:04 +0000, Andy Walsh wrote:
> 2) The size of the final waf bin/lib install, even if stripped down
> to the
> bare minimum of smbd/nmbd/smbpasswd is unsuitable for most older
> routers
> that have just 8MB nvram and problematic for 16/32 MB more recent
> routers,
> depending on what other packages are added to the firmware.
> 
> The smallest samba 4.3 package we could manage to build is around 9
> -12MB or
> 4.9MB lzma compressed using this makefile + some multicall/static
> linking
> hacks/patches:
> https://github.com/wongsyrone/openwrt-1/tree/master/package/external
> /samba43related/samba43
> 
> In contrast Samba 3.6 can be stripped down to around 900kb (lzma),
> which is
> not a problem for 8MB nvram targets.

The big difference between 3.6 and the 4.x series is that far more IDL
is generated and compiled.  Much of that probably could be skipped,
with some care and waf work.  It is harder because we have started to
use DCE/RPC services internally that we might not need for clients, but
I would give that a shot.

Patches to make Samba more modular (and to then allow those modules to
be disabled) will be considered.  Ideally we contain that to waf rules,
rather than #ifdef in the code.

Having a configure option to build just a standalone (auth against
passdb) file server exposing a similar set to what Apple exposes
(because that will give us a reasonable way to manage expectations)
would be one approach. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba