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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: samba and NFS support (was: Re: from Corel: may we help?)
From:       Nicolas Brodu <brodun () aston ! ac ! uk>
Date:       1999-11-26 11:25:41
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aleXXX wrote:
> 
> On Fr, 26 Nov 1999, Alex Zepeda wrote:
> > On Fri, 26 Nov 1999, aleXXX wrote:
> >
> > P.S. Has anyone actually seen the kio_smb bits and pieces in kdebase? They
> > seem to work pretty well.

Well, thanks, but they're not perfect (see below).

> I haven't seen them yet, but I know there are so many different configurations
> of LAN's, that it is quite hard to make it work with them all (there are even
> LAN's without working name servers and nobody cares).

That's the problem. As far as I know, the libsmb we wrote works fine for some
LANs configurations, but not all. The major problems are when the SMB network
spans several subnets (need to find domain controllers), and when the answer
to SMB queries are sent back to the server (that is samba, if it is installed)
and not the client. This happens for example for NT logons.

> My approach in kNetmon was to make it transparent to the user wether he
> accesses samba shares, NFS exports or anything else.
> The main idea was to provide a overview over the hosts which are connected to
> his LAN. To find them there are multiple ways (one using smbclient, one using
> TCP, and one using slist (never tried)).
> Then every host was searched for shares (samba, NFS, novell), the user should
> not have to worry about the type, he could simply mount them (if everything is
> configured correctly).

I'd be interested to know how you did it. I haven't tried the lists either.

> What I want to say, AFAIK for every ioslave there is an URL-prefix (ftp://,
> file:// and so on), am I right ?
> If I would go this way, (smb://, NFS:// or something like that) I would lose
> transparency. Should I try to make something like LAN://some_host/someshare ?

Hmmm, smb and NFS are not the same. I used to access the same host using both
protocols, with different shares.
For smb, at present the solution for transparency is to consider everything
as directories (wheter workgroup, share lists, or real directories).
ex: smb://workgroup will return the members
smb://[workgroup/]host will return the shares (workgroup optional)
smb://[workgroup/]host/share/dir/file gets the file
...

> 
> Another question:
> AFAIK the ioslaves don't mount the stuff they access, they make it accessible
> via URLs to other KDE-apps, am I right ?

Yes.

> Is the reason therefor that e.g. you can't mount tgz-files ?
> My question is: it is possible to mount either NFS-, samba- and
> Novell-"shares".
> Should they be mounted somewhat transparently by the ioslave
> (e.g. if not mounted, showing them as somekind virtual  directories and if
> mounted showing transparently the mounted directories) ?
> In this case every (also non-KDE) app could use them.
> Until now I did it like this: As I mentioned, I searched for hosts and shares,
> created a tree which shows them. Then the user could open a context menu for
> each host/share, and e.g. select "Explore", then the selected share was mounted
> and a filemanager was opened showing the mounted directory.
> To mount the stuff I created a directory structure equivalent to the structure
> of the LAN (e.g. to mount the share "public" from host "server" in workgroup
> "windows" it was mounted under ANY_ROOT_DIR/windows/server/public, whereas
> ANY_ROOT_DIR defaulted to ~/network).

That could just be the solution for NFS, but for SMB I think this introduces too
much overhead. In this case, sending different packet types to the different
servers will give you those informations. Then, they are cached in memory
instead of a temporary tree on disk.
 
> Should I stay this way or do it the other way (then I must switch to smblib)

As libsmb author, my point of view might not be objective. What I think, though,
is that if you have a better solution than libsmb then you can 
either:
. Put it into KDE directly. This would be better for the users.
. Merge our works.
In any case it will require some work.

Problem for me is that I have great difficulty to access SMB networks from 
here. I'm no longer in the environment where I started to code the lib, and
cannot work on KDE2 directly (have to transfer everything on floppy and compile
at home, offline). So If you can do a better work than me, please go 
on!

> and create all the stuff which exists to mount these shares (samba, NFS,
> Novell ) new.
> 
> Bye
> Alex

Cheers,
Nicolas Brodu

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