Most Efficient Network File sharing protocol?

[Fernando Cassia]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:35 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So? What did the samba devs say? Did they even bother to answer the
> question?
>
> Best, :-)

Here's the update: the last kernel on top of which you can run NETBEUI
is 2.4 [1]

Nobody seems to have ported the required kernel patches to 3.x kernels :-(.

This is what I remembered about Samba 2.x used with NetBEUI
https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2000-July/008748.html

Back then Samba's Jeremy Allison (now at Google, apparently?) said "It
will of course *definately* be merged for (Samba) 3.0. It'll probably
be done as a ./configure option (--with-netbeui)."

But it never happened because the changes to the kernel it relied on
where never added to the mainline Linux kernel.

Here, Allison himself explained in 2006 [2]: "The problem was that
depended on Linux kernel changes that never
got added (and I don't think would get added)" concluding that "It
might be worth revisiting at some future point, but currently I don't
have the bandwidth to add it. If someone wanted to do this it would
make an excellent
"summer of code" style project."

Now it's one of those times where I wish I had the knowledge to bring
those patches to the current kernel... :)

NetBEUI (Microsoftspeak) aka NETBIOS (IBMSpeak) aka NBF  [4] is really
fast, believe me.  And complies with the "KISS Principle" [3] of
having low overhead (but also no strong crypto, no fancy modern
features, it's just to share files between trusted machines on a local
LAN segment, and it did so very nicely :)

Oh well... :-/
FC

[1] NetBEUI support patches ported to kernel 2.4.24
http://zhubr.tamb.ru/netbeui/
[2] Allison on why NetBEUI was never added (2006)
https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2006-January/116383.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS_Frames_protocol