Samba Was Written (2003)

Summary

How Samba was written --------------------- Andrew Tridgell August 2003 Method 1: --------- First off, there are a number of publicly available documents on the CIFS/SMB protocol. The documents are incomplete and in places rather inaccurate, but they are a very useful starting point. Perhaps the most useful document is "draft-leach-cifs-v1-spec-02.txt" from 1997 which is a protocol specification released by SNIA and authored primarily by Microsoft (with significant input from many other people, including myself). This document has expired as an IETF draft, and Microsoft has dropped their attempts to get CIFS accepted as an IETF standard, but the document is still available if you look hard enough with an internet search engine. There are numerous other public specifications for various pieces of the protocol available. I maintain a collection of the ones I know about in http://samba.org/ftp/samba/specs/ Method 2: --------- I call this method the "French Cafe technique". Imagine you wanted to learn French, and there were no books, courses etc available to teach you. You might decide to learn by flying to France and sitting in a French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you. You take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what food arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for "bread", "coffee" etc. We use the same technique to learn about protocol additions that Microsoft makes. We use a network sniffer to listen in on conversations between Microsoft clients and servers and over time we learn the "words" for "file size", "datestamp" as we observe what is sent for each query. Now one problem with the "French Cafe" technique is that you can only learn words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other words? Say for example you want to learn to swear in French? You would try ordering something at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe or poking him in the eye when he gives you your order. As you are being kicked...