Re: [Qemu-devel] Feature request: integrated smb server?

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 16:21, David E.Still wrote:
> what would it take to integrate a small smb server intoqemu's
> networking code? 

A lot. Having implemented a NetBT stack and read a lot about SMB in a
past life, there's no such thing as a small SMB server; it's a complex
layered set of protocols. You would have to integrate Samba if you
really wanted to do this feasibly.

Curious, what is your need? As you say, most OS's can mount and expose
SMB shares. That means that the guest can already do what you want. Why
not just expose an SMB share in the guest and mount it over the network?
VmWare's integrated SMB server is one of the bits of evil in it; I've
had issues with VmWare's various services that it installs interfering
with the real thing...

The argument you could make for such a feature is zero setup to do. Just
start the guest, and QEMU exposes the file transfer service. The guest
doesn't know anything about it. The user doesn't have to set anything
up.
> beable to write and *install* to the host system.  I'm not suggesting 

What do you mean by install? Don't installers usually have to access the
registry?

There was a thread a little while back that discusses your suggestion.
Fabrice decided that FTP was the way to go over HTTP or SMB, since it is
simple and clients are readily available. One thing to understand is
that the last mile to the guest's disk is a tricky thing. Operating
systems tend to make the assumption that they have exclusive access to
filesystems they have mounted. So read-only access is probably the best
you can hope for without living very dangerously. 

On Windows, if you really want to be able to write to the host file
system, you should probably go through SMB to do it. Then all the
authentication, arbitration, perimissions, decryption, etc. is done by
the host OS. And if you believe that, then you have to set up an SMB
client to talk to Window's SMB server anyway. So embedding an SMB server
wouldn't save any work.

Of course there could be simplifying assumptions I'm missing that could
take SMB out of the equation. I'm interested to hear those from
others...

-- John.