C.2 Of Round Pegs, Square Holes, and Big Mallets

The SMB URL might have turned out to be fairly simple and straight-forward, but this is CIFS we're talking about. CIFS is a complex protocol suite, and the requirements for the new URL scheme quickly became proportionally complex. Some of the things people wanted from the SMB URL included the ability to:

specify SMB resources available via NBT and naked TCP transport,
list all available NBT Workgroups,
list the servers within an NBT Workgroup, and
locate Active Directory servers and list the file servers within an Active Directory (W2K) domain.

In addition, there was a general hope that the SMB URL would look and feel a lot like the older UNC format used by Windows and OS/2, while still retaining all of the virtues of the more modern, user -friendly, and familiar URL format.

That's a lot to cram into a single URL scheme.

Although the basic design of the SMB URL took only a week or so to work out, some of the finer points required a lot more discussion. In fact, as of this writing the SMB URL Internet Draft is on its fourth revision and clearly needs to be overhauled at least one more time. The need for an update is due in part to the fact that the author didn't know much about writing IETF Internet Drafts when he started. It is also true, however, that a number of fiddly issues needed to be addressed things like ensuring that the SMB URL scheme conformed to the general URI syntax, and annoying stuff like that.

The following discussion should, therefore, be considered unreliable. See the most current SMB URL Internet Draft or (some day, hopefully) SMB URL RFC.