On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 12:57:52 -0600
John Canessa <john.canessaSENCORSOFT.COM> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am new to this list. I would like to get some basic questions answered.
>
> 1) What is the difference between SMB and CIFS?

Basically nothing. SMB was renamed to CIFS several years ago. However,
sometimes you'll find additional context meaning SMB also refers to a
core transport layer whereas CIFS is all the layers including Remote
Access Protocol (RAP) and DCE/RPC tranactions. So SMB is the protocol
and CIFS is everything that comes with it. But I don't have anything in
writing to back that up :~)

> 2) Where could I get some sample code for a CIFS server to get
> me started?

For free? If you're ok with looking at GPL'd Samba code it's not the
most elegant thing in the world but it's actually very well behaved as
SMB servers go. Otherwise I'm not aware of any "sample code". Writing an
SMB server isn't exactly a "strait-forward" process. I've never written
one but I've got an idea of what it takes. It all depends on how much you
want to support. In the simplest case (no multiplexing or transactions,
a few really basic commands) it's a month or two of work maybe. If you
wan't multiplexing, batching, pipes, Unicode, NTSTATUS *and* DOS error
codes, RAPs, the various authentication mechanisms, etc it's a several
year project and you'd better have at least one person who knows quite
a bit about the protocol.

> A simple answer as a URL would suffice.

Well, if there's one URL this would have to be it:

  http://www.snia.org/English/Work_Groups/NAS/CIFS/WG_CIFS_Docs.html

The CIFS "Technical reference", Ethereal, NetMon, a few Windows machines,
a Linux box running Samba, and a lot of quality time is all you really
need I think. You can ask questions here too. For reasons I haven't quite
figured out the SMB developers don't colaborate here too muchthough. I
guess there just aren't that many people writing SMB servers and clients.

Mike

--
May The Source be with you.
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