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On Wednesday 11 July 2007 11:06, David Johnson wrote: > On Wednesday 11 July 2007 09:26, Tom Potts wrote: > > The important things to remember here are: > > 1) Samba is a reverse engineering of a proprietary protocol. > > Actually there are some specs out there, especially for the newer CIFS > stuff, although naturally the stuff Microsoft have added is not publicised. > > > 2) Novell and M$ are working together to increase M$/Linux interactivity > > - with the real protocol specs Novell will be able to produce a > > smaller/tighter/faster integration without referring to Samba code - > > unless M$ does it for them, or perhaps M$ have already done something in > > VastaMistake that will prevent Samba catching up (DRM ing something out > > of malice) They could right this up on proprietary code so they wont give > > a hoot about GPLn. > > Even with the specs it would take them a lot of time and money to produce a > new SMB implementation from scratch, even if you assume that Windows > actually follows Microsoft's own specs (it absolutely doesn't). Most likely > they'd fork from the current version of Samba and extend that; their but they wont need to use samba - they already have the software - its written in C or C++ and talks TCP/IP so it wont take five minutes to convert to linux and it wont need the GPL. > changes would then be released as per GPLv2 and could be incorporated back > into Samba. > > I'm not sure what's been added to SMB in Vista, but remember that it has to > be backwards-compatible - Vista has to talk with every Windows release from > about 3.11 up, so locking Samba out by changing the protocol isn't an > option for them. > > > 3) Samba is for communication with a dying computer OS. You should only > > use it to talk to legacy systems while migrating their users. You wont > > need to stick it somewhere they have Vasta -they'll be too licensed up to > > make it worthwhile. > > Actually the SMB and CIFS protocols are perfectly good in their own right. > There's no reason they couldn't/shouldn't be used in Linux only networks. > MacOS also has an implementation and work is on-going to add UNIX-only > extensions to Samba so that it actually performs better and with more > features for Linux and Mac users. This is another case of the naive following the desperate. I've not seen Samba offer anything that wasn't already available in *Nix other that the ability to talk to windows. OK its easier to use Samba than set your linux systems up properly - it takes a second to connect to a Windows share from Linux using SMB and several minutes to do the same with NFS but if your going to use bodges like that it will come back and haunt you*. Tom te tom te tom * ok I do too.... > > Regards, > David. > > -- > David Johnson > www.david-web.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html