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That's an interesting perspective. I had been under the impression that the concept/implementation was fine, until Microsoft started diddling with the system i

That's an interesting perspective. I had been under the impression that the concept/implementation was fine, until Microsoft started diddling with the system in order to mess them around. Specifically: wasn't Samba based on a 'clean room' implementation of some Microsoft protocol or something like that? And when it took off Microsoft were in the middle of their 'kill Linux in the enterprise at all costs' jihad and so they kept changing the protocol that the Samba guys were trying to interface/interact with?

codex 16y ago
In a word, no. Microsoft could not change the protocol because it still had to support the hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows clients out in the field. With Vista, Microsoft cleaned up the protocol a bit (SMB2), but it was the Samba team's paranoid fantasy that this somehow applied to them. Really, it was a long-overdue revision which helped performance tremendously. While the Samba team had a huge task, this does not excuse the extremely crappy implementation over the years: corrupt TDBs, lack of change notify, no native ACL support, oplock crashes due to the non-asynchronous, single threaded nature of each smbd, horrible Winbind scalability problems, domain join bugs, no real named pipe abstraction layer, no alternate data stream support, etc. And the code is just horrible to look at.