Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 16:56:36 -0700 (MST) From: Matt Day <mday@artisoft.com> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: SAMBA Message-ID: <199608292356.QAA16536@sting.artisoft.com>
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Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> wrote: > Matt Day <mday@artisoft.com> wrote: > > If you want to mount Win95 drives from a FreeBSD system, please > > don't wait for CIFS - CIFS won't be ready for months, at least. > > Instead, port or write ksmbfs for FreeBSD! The ksmbfs kernel module > > for Linux (in Samba's contributed section) already provides the > > capability to mount SMB volumes from Linux. (Unfortunately, you > > can't NFS export stuff mounted by ksmbfs, due to limitations.) > > Getting ksmbfs on FreeBSD would also be a great way to help prepare > > FreeBSD for CIFS. > > > > Download ksmbfs from: > > ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/contributed/ksmbfs-0.2.4.tgz > > How do you resolve: > > 1) It's GPL'ed code > > 2) It does not allow per-user enforcement of credential mapping > > The first is not really a kicker if it's distributed as an LKM, and the > LKM is not distributed pre-loaded. Its just that you can't sell or > even give away the agregate system because of the license conflicts. > > > The second is a serious issue, since it damages the SMB server > administrators management authority to have all users from a given > UNIX box appear as as a single SMB client. This was my objection > to the SMBFS suggestions I have seen in the past. > > [.. Terry's examination of authentication problem deleted ..] The authentication problem is certainly a difficult one to solve well, but I don't think it's an smbfs show-stopper. If someone out there is considering porting/writing smbfs for FreeBSD, my advice regarding the authentication issues is this: ignore them, for now. Getting an smbfs working to the point where one can mount an SMB volume and read/write files is enough of a challenge, and such an smbfs would be very valuable to many FreeBSD users (including me!). Lots of people want to share files between FreeBSD and SMB servers, but only a portion of those people care about security. So after the file sharing piece is working, we can deal with the security issues. Hopefully by then the CIFS guys will have come up with a way to do it, and we can just adopt their way and be even closer to being compatible with CIFS. The GPL issue is hardly worth thinking about. Rewrite the code under the Berkeley license if you like, or put the code under sys/gnu, like the ext2fs stuff. Matt Day <mday@artisoft.com>
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