Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard
I don't often write about my day to day work, but sometimes I run across a problem that is so intransigent that it was a triumph when I finally fixed it.
If you take an engineering job in the software industry, this is the kind of thing you might end up working on. If you find this column fun and interesting, then you might be a good candidate for a network engineer. Even if you don't I hope you'll appreciate the insane level of detail network engineers have to know on your behalf, to make something as simple as “saving a file” work seamlessly across operating systems.
One of the remedies imposed on Microsoft after they lost the European Union workgroup-server anti-trust case was the requirement to publish the full specifications for third party software to interoperate with their operating systems. They are still in the process of doing this, but there are now thousands of pages of documentation out there, in theory fully specifying the Server Message Block/Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS) protocol that Samba and Windows file servers implement. So surely anyone and their auntie (assuming your auntie is a network engineer can now write their own SMB/CIFS server by just reading this copious documentation. After all, now it's all documented how hard can it be?
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