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Re: Operational impact of filtering SMB/NETBIOS traffic?

  • From: Jim Mercer
  • Date: Sun Nov 19 12:34:08 2000

On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 02:38:04AM -0800, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> You are assuming (wrongly) that microshit is the only one using that
> protocol. Have you never heard of the samba project? I remember explicitly
> referencing smb.conf files. That's Unix/Samba bud. I also mentioned that it
> works better than NFS. I don't recall microshit-anything shipping with NFS.
> Believe it or not, one or two of us actually know what we're doing.

as far as samba working better than NFS, that is a religious argument.

if you are using SMB to share files between unix systems, then i have a bit
of trouble with that last line of the above.

personally, i can't think of any applications where i would attempt to do
any kinda filesystem sharing across the internet.

i suspect the widespread use of SMB on the internet is again, because of the
brain-dead applications produced by a braindead company and software
produced by lazy programmers working in the braindead company's API's.

why does the application need a "share"?  can it not just negotiate the
information needed without mounting the entire office over a 33.6K connection?

> > geez, if the filter was there, are you saying that people who 
> > _need_ SMB shares are too brain-dead to come up with a straight
> > forward way to make it get around the filter?
> 
> There is no straight-forward way around a filter, by definition the
> straight-forward way is to not have the filter!

no, the brain-dead easy way around the filter is to have no filter at all.

i'm not an SMB user (outside a few LAN's where we explicitly drop it all
on the floor before it gets out of the network).

could you not use an IPSec tunnel from one LAN to another, then run SMB
over that tunnel?

is it not possible to use ssh port forwarding to move the packets through
a secure tunnel that way?

-- 
[ Jim Mercer                 [email protected]              +1 416 410-5633 ]
[          Reptilian Research -- Longer Life through Colder Blood          ]
[  Don't be fooled by cheap Finnish imitations; BSD is the One True Code.  ]