-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Simon Slavin wrote: > Standard Windows drive sharing uses SMB, sometimes called SAMBA.
SMB stands for Server Message Block - the name of the protocol as originally developed by IBM in 1982. The protocol is extensible in that a dialect is negotiated up front, there are numerous bit flags indicating features (eg adding Unicode, changing bulk read/write handling) which were later added, various requests have info-levels - a number indicating the data structure expected. There have been implementations of clients and servers in Dos, Xenix, OS/2, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, Windows NT line as well as on Unix using ported Windows code (lookup ASU), native implementation on DEC Pathworks etc. There is not one protocol, but rather a huge hairy mess that has grown over time. (For example there are several different ways to open a file, at least 5 different ways to write, numerous different IPC mechanisms, different locking mechanisms and every new version of the Windows NT/2K/XP etc line had the habit of directly marshalling internal kernel data structures over the wire which changed with each release.) In the mid-90s when all the Internet stuff was getting hot, Sun decided to call NFS WebNFS. Microsoft responded by calling the protocol CIFS (the I stands for Internet) and doing some minor tweaks that made their implementation less restrictive when setting up connections. Samba is a free software (GPL) implementation of the protocol and by far the most common non-Microsoft one. However it has to translate the expected semantics into what the platform it is running on has. These expectations change by client and server versions and in some cases even by what the filesystem type is reported as (consequently Samba typically reports most filesystems as ntfs even though they aren't). There are maddening little implementation details, bugs becoming established behaviour and worked around by clients and servers (which break if you fix the bug) etc. Sometimes applications have surreal behaviour (Excel is the king of this). In short there is nothing "standard" about it, and calling it "Samba" is wrong :-) Roger -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkrrSSgACgkQmOOfHg372QR9hwCfdBp8mpO4x94Uldks9n9r3i5W dGcAmwbzfVrd3tiUJ8GYClJQDwJwd1b4 =xWbt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list [email protected] http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
