Re: [PATCH 2/2] smbinfo: rewrite in python

[ronnie sahlberg <ronniesahlberg@gmail.com>]

Very nice, thanks for doing this!

Does this make the other python tools we have in cifs-utils obsolete?
I don't think so.

I think we should keep both smbinfo as well as the dedicated tools.
Leave smbinfo as a generic read and dump the info to the screen
utility for any/all types of info,
but additionally have specialized tools that are much more complex for
some specific tasks.

What comes to my mind here would be specialized tools for quota,
security descriptors, snapshots to start with.
These tools would be much more specialized than smbinfo and also
provide command line arguments (and optional GUI)
to set and mutate the object they operate on.
I.e. do a lot of things that would possibly be outside the scope of smbinfo.

For quota for example I could imagine it having an optional GUI as
well as command line arguments to also SET the quota.
Maybe having integration with winbind to allow mapping SIDs to/from
Account Names,
possibly even having a configuration file so that a hypothetical
smb2-quota --check   would check the quota limits and provide
alerts/emails based on the configuration file.

I.e. full blown utility to manage the quota as well as a "--check"
command that can be run as a cron job.


For snapshots it would be nice with a dedicated tool, with optional
GUI, that would list all mounted cifs filesystems,
and possibly also read additional server/shares from a configuration
file that would allow you to fully manage snapshots, including
mounting and unmounting them.
I.e. everything you can do from windows explorer you should be able to
do from this tool.
Of course we are not nearly there yet but we have to start from
somewhere and it is just a matter of continue to incrementally improve
these tools.


We could of course do this to smbinfo too but I think it would be
better to keep these specialized tools as separate programs
even if there is some functionality overlap between them and smbinfo.


regards
ronnie sahlberg

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 3:19 AM Aurélien Aptel <aaptel@suse.com> wrote:
>
>
> Note that I haven't tested the `quota` and `list-snapshots` sub-commands
> as I don't know how to set that up easily on my Windows Server vm (let
> me know how if you know, thx) so please give it a try, these are
> untested.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Aurélien Aptel / SUSE Labs Samba Team
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