Slashdot Mirror
Tridgell Taking Samba Beyond POSIX
dW writes "The Australian hacker has been working on pushing Samba beyond the POSIX world and figuring out what work needs to be done to get Samba to support new filesystems such as XFS, ext3, and Storage Tank. The answer is nothing less than a complete rewrite of Samba's smbd code, which has become his latest pet project. Here's an interview with Andrew Tridgell on his latest Samba rewrite."
What he's talking about is taking advantage of "exotic" filesystems. Currently Samba just assumes it has a plain-old Posix filesystem like ext2 behind it, and does things less efficiently than might be possible
I'm not sure ext3 is a good example, but let's imagine it has a concept of transactions. Samba might be able to take advantage of that to provide a better implementation of CIFS, but to do that it has to know about ext3, more than that it's compatible with Posix.
Other examples: ACLs, case-sensitivity, multiple streams in files (like Macintosh resource forks), stuff like that.
No exactly. For example see NFS v4 ACLs:
READ_DATA Permission to read the data of the file
LIST_DIRECTORY Permission to list the contents of a
directory
WRITE_DATA Permission to modify the file's data
ADD_FILE Permission to add a new file to a
directory
APPEND_DATA Permission to append data to a file
ADD_SUBDIRECTORY Permission to create a subdirectory to a
directory
READ_NAMED_ATTRS Permission to read the named attributes
of a file
WRITE_NAMED_ATTRS Permission to write the named attributes
of a file
EXECUTE Permission to execute a file
DELETE_CHILD Permission to delete a file or directory
within a directory
READ_ATTRIBUTES The ability to read basic attributes
(non-acls) of a file
WRITE_ATTRIBUTES Permission to change basic attributes
(non-acls) of a file
DELETE Permission to Delete the file
READ_ACL Permission to Read the ACL
WRITE_ACL Permission to Write the ACL
WRITE_OWNER Permission to change the owner
SYNCHRONIZE Permission to access file locally at the
server with synchronous reads and writes