lsmb coming soon!

Its been just 3 months since Likewise 5.0 was announced and the uptake has been phenomenal. But we have several new technologies that will be out very shortly. The most important of these is our new SMB architecture.

As you know we rehabilitated DCE/RPC and made it Microsoft extension compatible and added a new portable threading model.  We had to add named pipe support and to do this, we created a client side named pipe architecture on top of  Samba’s libsmbclient. This worked quite well, but we figured we would actually want native named pipe support.

lsmb is our effort in that direction.  lsmb consists of a multithreaded daemon that has the following components.

- A clean native named pipe API that includes the Windows named pipe APIs layered on top of our native API infrastructure. The named pipe API supports both client and server side named pipes.

- A dce/rpc systems whose ncacn_np infrastructure is built on top of this named pipe system. Basically we will be releasing both client and server side DCE/RPC support over named pipes in the next few months

- Because the named pipe APIs are the same as the standard remote file system APIs, that means we will be providing programmatic support for anyone who wants to read and write from and to a Windows file server

In addition, we’ve just released on trunk our srvsvcd daemon and client API. This contains the Windows File share APIs running natively on Linux

Stay tuned – its going to be a very compelling New Year 2009 for the Likewise Open project!