Linux.conf.au 2003 | Abstracts

Towards full NTFS semantics in Samba

Andrew Tridgell

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Over the last few years Samba has become a popular platform for building scalable Network Attached Storage systems that support the CIFS protocol used in Microsoft Windows networks. While Samba has enjoyed quite a lot of success as a NAS platform, the original design considerations for Samba were aimed at exposing the Unix/Posix security and filesystem model to the CIFS protocol. More recently the emphasis for NAS vendors has been implementing the fine detailed NTFS semantics in the CIFS protocol and this has stretched the design of Samba beyond what was originally intended.

The basic problem is one of 'semantic mapping', particularly with filesystem semantics. In this talk I will discuss the various semantic mapping problems of implementing CIFS on Posix systems and will propose a set of modifications to both Samba and the underlying operating system to allow future versions to provide much more accurate NTFS semantics.