SMB status

[Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>]

Hello list,

I wanted to give a brief overview about Samba support in gvfs after the
recent changes this week. Please refer to the previous thread to see
what was broken:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gvfs-list/2008-May/msg00005.html

The only thing not working now which I'm aware of is the authentication
support in smb-browse: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524485

This is marked as 2.24 blocker but I'm not confident in pushing the
patch upstream and guess it would be rejected by the release team
anyway. I've recently found more Kerberos issues and intend to test
different Samba versions (we should still support the 3.0 series).

Since gvfsd-smb-browse is automounted, we're still facing the blocking
issues across whole Gnome desktop - several applications use blocking
query_info() calls in hope the stat will be fast. Well, it actually
isn't that fast and such usage should be handled asynchronously. For
example gnome-panel still has 6 sync query_info() calls in utility
functions, which are used everywhere. What we can do here is to optimize
gvfs not calling full stat if user application requests just
standard::display_name or so (this is on my todo list...). From what I
heard there's a similar blocking issue in gvfsd-http.


What has been fixed:
- I decided to encode username and domain (if set) to the URI string
just like for other backends. This will fix several issues where freshly
mounted share couldn't be found (actually it led Nautilus to mount the
share for the second time). I tried to find out the purpose of not
including username in URI but couldn't find any -- Alex, please confirm.

- Setting the mountspec information was reverted back to be done before
the actual auth loop. There were constant issues in pulling in
domain/workgroup and was difficult to find out if we really need it
(actually, the cross-ADS domain login still needs to be tested,
basically the domain is set automatically by samba during hostname
resolving). Again, it caused numerous mount issues in Nautilus.
   To be precise here, we should introduce multiple mountspec allowance
in gvfs - one from the original credentials and the second for real
credentials (used to succeed the mount).

- Login loop in gvfsd-smb was adapted to an approach found during ADS
authentication patch development. This allows proper Kerberos auth along
with anonymous login in one pass.


Please note all the work was done just week before final 2.24 tarballs
and is only tested on a limited number of systems. (Have you ever seen
perfectly stable .0 release? :-) )

I'm leaving for two-weeks vacation now, further questions will have to
wait.

Cheers,
-- 
Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>