ChuckAnyone know why CIFS support is so sad in FreeBSD? I've got a NAS that is exporting things to the windows clients that I also use on non-window clients but no, I'm not gonna let it run V1.
Karl Auerbach@ChuckMcManis I am not particularly proud of the work we did on that RFC. But we had a lot of technical and political constraints.
ewhac@ChuckMcManis Oy... Don't get me started...
I have CIFS/Samba running on the old TrueNAS (without AD). While there *was* a Windows client once, there isn't anymore. Meanwhile, accessing from my Linux machines occasionally gives weird errors, and the files on the server itself keep acquiring very bizarre ACLs.
And I never figured out how to get UID mapping working properly.
@ChuckMcManis It's enough to make me want to switch to NFS...
@ewhac Also have TrueNAS. Since the goal is to get rid of Windows eventually this is likely a temporary pain. I did try using NFS on the Windows side for a while and every single time Windows did an update it turned it off and things broke. I blame Paul Leach at Microsoft but there are others. At one time I had a copy of the court ordered 'full' specification for CIFS V2/V3.
Nuke Them from OrbitYou'd need to find a copy of my RPC presentation at the IETF in Amsterdam in 1991 to get it. π
I didn't find this, of course, since almost everything from back than seems to have rotted away.
But I believe you. You likely had very good reasons. Actually I think we should have more specific name accountability when people work for super villains.
Well in this case Paul had come to Microsoft from Apollo Computers and I was RPC architect for Sun proposing we give the IETF RPC/XDR for free and we could make it a standard. Paul (and Microsoft) started attending IETF that year *specifically* to shut down Sun and any other standards that might "limit Microsoft's ability to compete." RPC and NFS were threats to them. 1/2
@glitzersachen @ewhac
What came out of that was a lot of noise about how "canonical transport" formats unfairly burdened machines that weren't canonical, and how one way of doing distributed storage couldn't possibly serve everyone forever. Anyway, water under the bridge as they say, Microsoft got their way and IETF didn't standardize an RPC. (or network attached storage until iWarp sometime later) 2/2
What came out of that was a lot of noise about how "canonical transport" formats unfairly burdened machines that weren't canonical, and how one way of doing distributed storage couldn't possibly serve everyone forever. Anyway, water under the bridge as they say, Microsoft got their way and IETF didn't standardize an RPC. (or network attached storage until iWarp sometime later) 2/2
Microsoft in the 90s, doing Microsoft. It's a riddle to me, how this ever was acceptable.
Personally I believe they haven't gotten better, but in camouflaging themselves.
Everybody's MMV.
πΊπ¦ haxadecimal π«π@ewhac @ChuckMcManis
Um... there still is a Windows CIFS client, at least in the latest update to Windows 10 Pro. I don't know about 11 or care to look.
Um... there still is a Windows CIFS client, at least in the latest update to Windows 10 Pro. I don't know about 11 or care to look.
@brouhaha @ChuckMcManis I meant that there used to be Windows machines in the house that (theoretically) needed access to the NAS. No longer.
@ewhac @ChuckMcManis
Ah. Thanks for clarifying.
I normally use Windows only on the home theater machine, to play stuff from the file server, exported as CIFS.
The CIFS share used to have guest access, but Microsoft no longer supports that, so it's more of a hassle now.
:-(
Ah. Thanks for clarifying.
I normally use Windows only on the home theater machine, to play stuff from the file server, exported as CIFS.
The CIFS share used to have guest access, but Microsoft no longer supports that, so it's more of a hassle now.
:-(
@ewhac @ChuckMcManis
Apparently you can enable the Widows CIFS client to support guest access with group policy, or a PowerShell command, or a registry change, but I wasn't able to get it to work.
Apparently you can enable the Widows CIFS client to support guest access with group policy, or a PowerShell command, or a registry change, but I wasn't able to get it to work.
Root Moose@ChuckMcManis I would be happy with a cifs/samba _client_ for FreeBSD.
In 2026 it's kinda ridiculous that a FreeBSD workstation can't mount samba shares. If it's possible with Linux emulation shenanigans... I don't care.
@RootMoose Yeah, that's all I want. So that I can have a shared volume on my network that both the Windows clients and the FreeBSD clients can see it. Alas.
@ChuckMcManis Same, same.
Honestly, it's the one thing that keeps me from running FreeBSD as a regular client in my network of machines.
And nope, I'm not gonna install NFS server on the box that hosts the shares.
πΉπππ π²πππππ β π€ͺ@RootMoose @ChuckMcManis isnβt that what gvfs used for?
@joel @ChuckMcManis iirc gvfs is just an abstraction layer for the underlying OS level tools like cifs-utils or whatever the BSD equivalent package would be.
@RootMoose @ChuckMcManis hum⦠what I meant was that if I install gfvs-samba (or nfs or whatever), I can then access there data using Thunar. On OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I think KDE has another technology.
Now, I you want the CLI that mounts Samba in the console so you can access it via nnn, I believe there is FUSE stuff, like susmb.
Graham PerrinBefore FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE, a planning document applied: <https://github.com/bsdjhb/devsummit/blob/main/15.0/planning.md>. Items included:
β smbfs replacement (v2 or better).
Looking ahead to 16.0-RELEASE, <https://github.com/bsdjhb/devsummit/blob/main/16.0/planning.md> applies. The initial version from BSDCan 2026 was committed four days ago.
I assume that an item for SMB/CIFS will appear in due course.
Cc @emaste
