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Hello Scott, You wrote: >My two big problems with Netserver are that it is buggy, and doesn't work >with all of the various SMB clients ("but it works with Windows, and >that's all that counts, right?!?!") and it's comparatively slow. Those are my main complaints about NetServer too. As I discovered when beating the NetServer APIs into submission (a fair number of the PTFs for NetServer were a direct result of me using the APIs and finding out that a) they didn't work, b) they didn't work as documented, or c) they worked when passed literals but not when passed variables -- doh!) NetServer is probably the buggiest piece of software to come out of Rochester. It is so bad that I'd swear it wasn't written by IBMers. It is so buggy that they drop support for things they can't get to work. For instance, NetServer supported OS/2 file and print sharing at VRM420 -- complete with PTFs for various OS/2 related fixes. Then they had problems with print sharing so they made that a permanent restriction. Then they had file share problems so they removed support for OS/2 entirely. You can see the history in IBMs APARs. Much NetServer documentation still says that OS/2 is supported ... Mind you, checking the APAR history indicates they've been working on NetServer since at least VRM370 and it didn't get released until 420 so they obviously had difficulty. Given how buggy it was at release (and still is) I'm inclined to think the problem is with the developers rather than anything else. What jars the most is that NT or W2K will quite happily share with OS/2 (except for W2K eating up connections for no adequate reason) and I KNOW Microsloth aren't doing anything to specifically support OS/2. Samba also works with OS/2. At least they don't specifically exclude OS/2 but NetServer does. It rejects an OS/2 connection attempt with a misleading "Invalid user or password" message which is crap because I've traced the SMB protocol and can see a valid user id and password being sent to NetServer. NetServer does support W31 clients which use very much the same SMB level as OS/2 so where's the problem -- long names? I realise that the SMB protocol has evolved with each MS OS but you would think that once a particular level worked NetServer could add support for the next level without breaking the previous level. Obviously not. So now NetServer (at 510) supports Linux. Big deal. Does that mean any Unix SMB implementation will work? SMB is SMB. What's so special about NetServer that they artificially restrict the client pool? Perhaps an AS/400 port of Samba would be the go? I know it would suffer in performance being implemented above the MI but surely it couldn't be any slower than NetServer itself? And if it supported any SMB client then that may mitigate the performance aspect. Who's interested? Regards, Simon Coulter. -------------------------------------------------------------------- FlyByNight Software AS/400 Technical Specialists http://www.flybynight.com.au/ Phone: +61 3 9419 0175 Mobile: +61 0411 091 400 /"\ Fax: +61 3 9419 0175 mailto: shc@flybynight.com.au \ / X ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail / \ --------------------------------------------------------------------
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