Leighton and four assistants have been developing a Unix-Windows NT distributed interoperability scheme since summer 1997. Leighton acknowledges that they are far from finished, but this book represents their collected notes as they partially network-reverse-engineer and partially document Microsoft's distributed computing remote procedure calls.
Leighton's fascinating first section describes the history and politics of communications protocol development and documentation/non-documentation strategies. He explains his apparently strange choice to ignore the official DCE/RPC documentation. The reason, he explains, is his group's motivation to network-reverse-engineer Microsoft's undocumented implementation, which is significantly dissimilar.
Boasting no figures at all, DCE/RPC over SMB consists of 217 pages of austere text ("written with vi and yodl... no GUIs were harmed") and 35 pages of appendices on Samba source code and Windows NT password and authentication methods. The book is a reference for do-it-yourselfers who want to use distributed computing in a Unix-Windows NT environment but can't afford the source license of Microsoft's DCE/RPC or need only a subset of Microsoft's DCE/RPC functionality.
In the minefield of proprietary protocols and software interoperability development, Laurie Petrycki and New Riders deserve special medals of valor for helping the free software community by publishing works in progress. DCE/RPC over SMB is the boldest mission yet. Single points of failure abound for both the project and the book. Even if Microsoft's implementation of RPC and SMB protocols remain quasi-static during Leighton's development time (Windows 2000 appears not to have undergone major changes), Microsoft could quite easily surprise the development community by publishing its own complete documentation, in which case all of the hard-won discoveries become redundant. The alternative, conceding "public" DCE/RPC interface and functionality issues in a multi-OS environment to Microsoft, is significantly less appealing. --Peter Leopold
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you really want to understand how SMB works buy this book,
By
This review is from: DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NT Domain Internals (Paperback)
Luke has written an excellent guide to internal workings of SMB. If you want to contribute to Samba development or are just curious about Windows networking and what it is and how it works from the inside out then this is the book you need.It's short on waffle and covers the subject to a depth that should satisfy any development project working on DCE/RPC over SMB. I'm the author of the Samba Black Book and I'd recommend that you buy Luke's book if you want to learn and understand some of the workings of the Samba code.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good book to master the internal mechanism of SMB,
By A Customer
This review is from: DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NT Domain Internals (Paperback)
I do recommend those who would like to learn about the internal details of SMB to buy this book.
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