[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
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 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. 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