Sun's OpenSolaris gets CIFS-ilis
Breaks out in Windows file-sharing rashes
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Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
The dead rising from the grave.
Human sacrifice, CIFS and Solaris living together — mass hysteria.
The open-source folks at Sun Microsystems have put the polish on an in-kernel CIFS service, which will allow Microsoft users to store and retrieve files on an OpenSolaris system.
According to Bob Porras, engineering veep for Solaris storage, the implementation will make The Common Internet File System (CIFS) — aka SMB — a "first class citizen" in Solaris, gaining tight integration with NFS, ZFS and Active Directory.
"¿Que?" you may be exclaiming (perhaps you've just arrived home from a Spanish language class). Surely there is Samba on Solaris.
Oh, ho ho. Indeed. But this native kernel implementation supposedly goes beyond the feature set on Samba. Or as Sun's Alan Wright elaborates on his blog:
There is a common misconception that Windows interoperability is just a case of implementing file transfer using the CIFS protocol. Unfortunately, that doesn't get you very far.
Windows interoperability also requires that a server support[s] various Windows services, typically MSRPC services and it is very sensitive to the way that those services behave: WIndows inter-operability requires that a CIFS server convince a Windows client or server that it "is Windows". This is really only possible if the operating system supports those services at a fundamental level.
Wright said Samba will continue to be a relevant multi-platform application service that provides file and print service for Windows and CIFS clients. Samba also has features and capabilities that the new integration doesn't yet have — and possibly never include, such as the ability to be a master browser.
Sun will incorporate CIFS Server in the 'Indiana' release of OpenSolaris, due out in the first half of 2008. It probably won't hit the commercial version of Solaris for a year or so, according to Barry Greenberg, Senior Engineering Manager at the Solaris Group.
This is all a part of Sun's plan for Solaris and its associated software to become the Switzerland of storage operating systems. Big businesses using systems from different vendors are looking for some multi-protocol love. Sun figures it can take its extended-arms approach to rival vendor systems with its open source community straight to the bank. ®
COMMENTS
Just more cloning of Linux
Daniel, did you ever stop to think SUN are doing this because their users ASKED them to?? It's been available as part of other commercial UNIX offerings for ages, and via Samba for almost as long. Take your head out of the sand and you'll notice lots of non-SUN systems happily sharing data, smoothly and easily, and SUN needs to too. This is just another example of SUN having to face facts - they lost the server wars, now they need to get chummy with M$ and the Penguinistas to survive!
Think of it more as a diesel being fitted into an old steam engine to try and keep the knackered old beast useful for a bit longer.... :P
HorsePower for Courses
Done right, Daniel, alluding to the inevitable car-analogy, would the Ride be Gallic Teutonic 42 dDeliver Out of this World XXXXPeriences.
So, they've done what Microsoft has done
They've integrated a whole heap of unnecessary 'services' into the system kernel, in order to make Solaris look as f**ked up as Windows, simply so that we can swap data around... Surely, it's this whole 'integrate it all directly into the kernel' business that A) causes Wiindows to be the circular-dependency Hell that it is B) causes Windows to be so insecure C) causes Microsoft to get dragged through the courts by people who want it to stop bundling everything together, for a change?
I'll simply allude to the inevitable car-analogy (which would probably involve fitting a Fiat engine into a Farrari, so that your local Fiat dealer can service it for you, or some-such) and say, instead, that it's like using mahogany to make chipboard.
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