[gpfsug-discuss] Release date for wide links support

Christof Schmitt christof.schmitt at us.ibm.com
Tue Sep 20 16:38:02 BST 2022


On Tue, 2022-09-20 at 13:20 +0000, Talamo Ivano Giuseppe (PSI) wrote:
> This Message Is From an External Sender
> This message came from outside your organization.       
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a question that's probably more for the IBM people in this
> group.
> A few months ago I added the idea [1] in the IBM portal to introduce
> again the wide links support in the samba shares and that's
> currently in the "Planned for future release" status.
> Considering that some of our clusters are somehow dependent on this
> feature, is there any way to know in which release/date it will be
> implemented?

I cannot comment on exact plans, but i can give some background.

First, "wide links" were never a supported feature in Scale. That
option was never added to the supported options in mmsmb or the GUI.

Probably the assumption on the user side was that the availability of
the option in the Samba code would be sufficient. Then that assumption
broke with code changes in Samba 4.13. But again, that was never
considered a supported feature in Scale.

The public Samba 4.13 release notes explain the view of the Samba
project:

https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.13.0.html

|Please note that the Samba developers recommend changing any Samba
|installations that currently use "wide links = yes" to use bind mounts
|as soon as possible, as "wide links = yes" is an inherently insecure
|configuration which we would like to remove from Samba. Moving the
|feature into a VFS module allows this to be done in a cleaner way
|in future.

Given that this is an inherently insecure feature, on a track to
eventually disappear, it is unlikely that this would be added as a
supported feature in Scale.

Regards,

Christof


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