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Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > 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. This is Microsoft we're talking about, I bet it wouldn't be that easy. For a start the code is probably talored for Windows. >> 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.... I was under the impression that NFS was fairly insecure, although not being an expert on general security I may be wrong. Rob -- 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