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

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 05:53:20PM +0200, Martin Wilck wrote:

> 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).

Er, um...  PAM and NSS will *never* be Unicode-aware.  There's no reason
for either of these APIs to care about the character set of the input
values (though individual modules may have reasons to care).  And if you
mean UCS2-capable, don't expect for that to happen, either: Unix already
has a standard Unicode encoding, and it supports all 32-bits of the 
codepoint space and does so without breaking traditional C string 
handling, thankyouverymuch.

Regardless, I agree that PAM and NSS are probably not what you're looking
for.  What you're probably *really* looking for is a complete DCE/RPC
implementation for Unix, of the sort that dcerpc.org aims to provide.  I 
know from talking with some of the Samba-TNG developers that they, at 
least, are eager for Wine to work with them to standardize on a common set 
of RPC implementations. :)

> 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.

Not what winbindd is meant for, really.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer