how to connect to com object "outside" from wine?

[Boaz Harrosh]

Ove Kaaven wrote:

>The Samba project is about communicating with Windows clients and
>servers, using the Windows protocols. For many services (authentication,
>printing, directory services, etc), modern Windows versions use RPC, not
>SMB. So the Samba folks have been forced to write a RPC protocol stack.
>This RPC stack should be available as a library (libsmbclient probably)
>to native Linux apps. I think they have a utility to generate
>marshalling code for any RPC interface, which could enable native Linux
>apps to access Windows RPC services through libsmbclient. This could
>prove useful because DCOM is built on top of RPC, though I don't know if
>they have any native DCOM support yet.
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>Communication happens on the RPC level, not the COM/OLE level. Builtin
>or native OLE shouldn't matter for this (though native OLE probably
>doesn't work with Wine's RPCRT4 for unrelated reasons).
>
>But currently Wine's RPCRT4 is not wire-compatible with anything but
>itself. There are many alignment issues that we currently don't take
>into account, for example. To use Wine's RPCRT4 for this, it'd have to
>be made wire-compatible with DCE RPC, or at least enough so to
>communicate with Samba. On the other hand, the native RPCRT4 would also
>take a fair bit of work to get to work under Wine.
>
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If I may summarize what I understood. There are 2 options:
1) It would be best to take Samba-project implementation of RPC and 
implement wine's RPCRT4 over that. This way we are both wire-compatible 
with DCE RPC and also we can use a ready made "libsmbclient" to send 
COM-RPC calls the wine way. (Remote or local) from Linux-Land. In this 
case in theory both native and builtin OLE implementations can be used.

2) Make a Linux-Land lib that is wire-compatible with wine-RPCRT4 and 
send COM-calls over that. Currently this approach can only use builtin 
OLE implementation, but that could be fixed.

Did I understand correctly? If so which way would you take?

>I imagine this Samba<->Wine RPC communication to happen over named pipes
>(once Wine supports remote named pipes), but other transport protocols
>could probably be used if easier to implement.
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What is Samba-RPC using, do you know?

>Now all of this may sound like a fair amount of work, and it probably
>is, but it's work that would really have to be done anyway sooner or
>later, so if you're looking for a general solution, it'd be more useful
>time spent for Wine to work on these things, rather than writing a
>dedicated server app.
>
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I'm with you 100% on that. This single fixture can be what makes Wine 
main-stream Linux just like samba is?

Juan, can you see the light at the end of the...?

>Pretty much... a regular RPC interface definition looks just like a DCOM
>interface, but without the [object] attribute in the interface
>
Good I'll give it a go.