Reply to post: Re: Samba is still relevant? Yea!

Re: Samba is still relevant? Yea!

I'm not sure whether I want to agree with you because you're right and pragmatic or disagree with you because you simply shouldn't be right :/

There is no particular reason why object storage systems have to be all-or-none solutions. By employing virtual file systems (basically how OneDrive and Dropbox integrate with Windows), it should be possible to support random access within reason. The S3 API has grown to become somewhat of a completely unmanageable beast. But it does have random access abilities. There should be no particular reason why a virtual file system couldn't be implemented which supports mapping remote files.

An example would be that if you connected to a shared OneDrive folder and the folder would be marked as "Online use only" and then pass requests over the API. SMB is substantially more efficient for this purpose, but at least in my experience... the most common use for large files these days is ISO files and software installations.

ISO files can be easily mapped by the systems that use them as iSCSI which is actually still quite a bit more efficient for this form of media than SMB. In addition, but of course security becomes a concern as iSCSI pretty much tops out at CHAP. However, iSCSI over IPv6 can be a big improvement when using IPv6 security. A better RBAC solution could of course be warranted. iSCSI also has pretty good directory services if SNS is configured appropriately.

As for installation media... I can safely say that I've found myself far too often using USB drives in recent history for lack of a good remote file system solution. Again, this could likely be resolved using S3 random access and with virtual file system drivers. I know there's a few commercial ones for Windows out there now and a quick search on Google found some "work in progress" open source ones as well. I don't know whether they support random access especially since S3 generally isn't used on premises, but it would be great if they do.

HTTPS overhead would probably have a pretty severe effect on performance, but it would be a pretty good option from a security perspective. Unlike the security in most other protocols, TLS tends to be hardware accelerated at both client and server. It also receives updates constantly when the client or server use the OS libraries.

As for logs... yeh... Samba is amazing for that. I use it as a model in my own software development. Actually had to remove a pile of logs from my current development project recently since 99.4% of my CPU usage was actually due to excessive logging. But to be fair, all protocols should be implemented with a LOT of logging as an option. :)

Thanks for the comment... as I said... I believe you're right but wish you were wrong :)