Re: FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Jan 03 2005 - 19:49:39 EST


tridge@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Thats taken from Samba4, where it is fully implemented. I guess Steve
is planning on integrating cifsfs with the Samba4 way of handling EAs,
NT ACLs, attribs, streams etc at some stage.

See http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/samba4/source/librpc/idl/xattr.idl for a full definition of the structures we use.

I used a NDR encoding in each of the xattrs to provide a well defined
architecture independent encoding, and an easy way to extend the
structure in the future (thats why DosAttrib is a union with a version
switch).


Oh geez. Couldn't you have split out the various data items into separate xattrs? This seems to be a really bad user interface, especially for writing (can't chmod the file without poking at all the other data items), except for a non-DOS-based filesystem to keep data for Samba itself. Samba clearly has other needs than other users, although of course it would be unfortunate if Samba then can't export this information.

In other words, I'm inclined to define simple system attributes or just go back to the original ioctl() patch for the DOS filesystems as seen by the kernel.

-hpa
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