CIFS will be strategic in some settings, but not included in kernel

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 1 - work for the deployments - this is the most important thing!
>> 2 - work for G1G1 users too - they are the donors and enthusiasts!
>> 3 - work for the developers - otherwise it won't get attention and bugfixes
>> 4 - work in as many places as possible
>> 5 - not cause security trouble
>> 6 - enable sharing across the internet if possible
>>
>> CIFS is only good on #2, and fails at all the other ones. It is a good
>> solution for a very narrow set of scenarios.
>
> Nope. CIFS meets them all. WebDAV fails at #2, #3, #4, #5.

How does it fail? Arguiing CIFS is better at #4 and #5 is not a
trivial thing :-)

> CIFS sure does feel yucky, but it works pretty well. CIFS is
> even done in userspace (GNOME's nautilus seems to have it).

If you are connected to a CIFS server, and it disappears on you, good luck.

CIFS is good for a wired LAN, where you trust your clients and you
have some kind of unified user database. Similar case as NFS in that
sense. Ownerships are preserved, file modes, the works. Good
performance too. All of that brings a hefty price in complexity and
security concerns.

WebDAV is better in that it does *less* and as such it sits much
further up in the stack.

Feel free to go ahead and implement it based on CIFS and solve the
related issues. With enough simplification work, it might even be an
option!

cheers,


m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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