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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: thoughts about network integration in KDE2, please read (was: Samba and NFS support)
From:       aleXXX <alexander.neundorf () rz ! tu-ilmenau ! de>
Date:       1999-12-02 13:28:38
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On Thu, 02 Dec 1999, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> aleXXX wrote:
> 
> I don't think this is the way to go. We want to have URLs and not pseudo
> commands :)
> 
> It surely would be nice if you could browse some kind of toplevel
> without
> entering ftp, but then you would have to create a list of all ftp
> servers
> in the net and that would be truely too much :)

I know. ;-)
And I do know that ftp://ftp.troll.no is internet standard.
I did not say scan the whole internet for ftp-servers.
I did not say no standard-URL's.
But these standard-URL's have another starting point.
You know the location and what you can get there.

Please anybody explain me how samba-support should look in kde2.
If it is only that you can only enter smb://some_host/some_share/a_file then it
is almost not worth doing it.
Nobody will use smbclient -Llocalhost to see which hosts exist and then enter
smb://and_so_on for every host.
And nobody will enter such an URL e.g. in a mp3-player.
And if you have a level which gives you a list of hosts then
this level doesn't belong to samba, ftp or whatever.
Samba, ftp and so on are on a level where two hosts exchange data.
They are not on the level which hosts are connected to a network.
E.g. smb://host_name/sharename describes a samba-share an a host (correct).
smb://host_name should describe a host, but describes only the samba-featues of
a host. A host is independent from samba. A host is a host and not a
samba-feature. Samba-support is a feature of a host. Of course it should be
able to have smb://somehost to see the shares of this host, but did you notice ?
This will give you the shares (samba-features), not common information about
the host.
Smbclient -L localhost gives you more or less reliable the hosts
currently connected to the LAN which support samba.
Do we want to have this or do we want to have a list of hosts, also containing
the hosts, which don't support samba ? 
In this case we need an ioslave independent from protocols like ftp, smb...
And there is no existing protocol for detecting hosts, so we can't use an
internet-standard-URL for this. The smb-(windows)-solution is very poor and
very specific. Only hosts supporting samba appear and sometimes they are still
visible although they are already away since hours.

Bye
Alex

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