Wine and Sambe (was: Re: RFC: Wine and PAM integration)

[Martin Wilck]

On Mon, 2002-09-23, 11.28, I wrote:

> > It seems it is better to ingegrate Wine with each
> > protocol individually - implement PAM-like
> > architecture inside Wine, but this architecture will
> > provide much more information to Wine.
> 
> No, please - let's not reinvent the wheel!

I have been thinking about this a bit further - perhaps I was wrong in
the first place.

There are two aspects I neglected:

 * NT security and NETAPI have a broader scope than PAM + NSS
   combined.
 * Unicode.

What we discussed so far were user authentification and
user/group/hostname lookups. Of course, this is only a small subset of
the NETAPI interface.

winbindd itself can do more, for example lookup a user SID on the remote
server. Even more functionality would be available by linking directly
against the Samba library libsmbclient.so, but we can't do that due to
license issues. 

Perhaps we should think about an extended winbindd that would follow
similar lines as the current Samba winbindd (talk to Unix Apps through a
Unix domain socket), but offer even more functionality that isn't
implemented in winbind because the information passed by such calls
makes no sense to Unix applications.

AFAICS, winbind does not expect applications to pass Unicode strings for
user names, domain names, etc., either. Our winbindd replacement would
need to be able to handle that, too; otherwise we wouldn't be able to
pass Unicode strings from a Windows application to a Windows server
without corruption. 

The winbindd replacement would need to be GPLd in order to link against
Samba libraries.

That way wine would be able to use the existing samba functionality.
If we had such a daemon, we could to reconsider the PAM and NSS 
routes because these probably won't be Unicode aware for some time to
come (correct me if I'm wrong).

Of course, we might as well try to convince the Samba team to offer more
functionality through winbindd itself, or submit patches for winbindd to
them.

Martin

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