Re: cifs 1.50 and dosemu 1.4 great combination

["Bart Oldeman" <bartoldeman@users.sourceforge.net>]

On 10/12/07, Alain M. <alainm@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry if I may seam a little dumb, but some time ago Bart said that lock
> did NOT work... and I googled about cifs and could not really understand
> the details.

Locking "works", but not 100%. The problem is that DOS has 5 different
locking modes (compat, deny read, deny write, deny all, and deny
none), but POSIX only 3 (none, read, and write).

So somehow DOSEMU maps 5 to 3 and tries to be reasonable, but it is a heuristic.
It may work, or it may not work for a particular application in a
particular situation.

And there's a chain:
DOSEMU -1> Linux fs = cifs -2> samba or Windows server

-1> translates DOS locks to POSIX locks (lredir'ed drive).
-2> (may) do the reverse (mounted drive using the Linux kernel cifs module).
smbfs used to do nothing at all with POSIX locks at -2> so it was
broken. cifs now does it better (possibly as well as two DOSEMU's
sharing files on an ext3 filesystem by now);
if the samba server implements POSIX extensions there isn't even a
lock translation anymore for step 2.

Having DOSEMU talk directly to the samba server could be 100% reliable
but a bit hard to setup (setup networking in DOSEMU, and install a DOS
samba client in it).

Bart