Bugzilla Bug 108689

I discovered this whilst carrying out a procedure on my server to change my
storage scheme. I'd backed up the data on my secondary (Windows 2003 server) and
planned to boot into the LiveCD and reconstruct my md RAID arrays according to
my wishes prior to a restore.

The problem is that CONFIG_CIFS is not set in the 2.6.12-gentoo-r6 kernel
supplied on this CD. Hence, I was unable to mount the share to which I had
backed up my data and had to defer this whole procedure for another day.

In contrast, CONFIG_SMB_FS is set so I attempted to make use of the smbfs
module. But its useless without samba installed as well (at the very _least_, it
needs supporting userspace mount tools).

I would request that the situation is reversed and that only cifs support is
made available. Here are my reasons:

* Having smbfs support in the kernel is simply not enough to be able to mount
and make use of any smb shares. You need a bunch of userspace tools which are
provided by samba and it expects to read /etc/samba/smb.conf as well.

* The smbfs code is pretty bad and is heading towards obsoletion. However, the
cifs code is actively maintained by Steve French at IBM and even has its own git
tree.

* There is _no_ reason whatsoever to use smbfs unless one needs to mount from
hosts running legacy systems such as <=Windows ME, OS/2 or MS-DOS. CIFS is
preferred in all other cases and I understand that Mr French is even working to
address this one shortcoming in cifs.

* There are many advantages to using CIFS - I quote: "CIFS VFS is designed to
take advantage of advanced network filesystem features such as locking, Unicode
(advanced internationalization), hardlinks, dfs (heirarchical, replicated name
space), distributed caching and uses native TCP names (rather than RFC1001,
Netbios names)"

* You don't need to worry about default codepages or any such nonsense with the
CIFS client. It also supports extended attributes and POSIX extensions (which is
great when communicating with a >=samba-3.0.5 server for example) ... see
CONFIG_CIFS_EA and CONFIG_CIFS_POSIX for further details.

* Better yet: "Unlike some other network filesystems all key network function
including authentication is provided in kernel (and changes to mount and/or a
mount helper file are not required in order to enable the CIFS VFS)." So it
doesn't need to read smb.conf, and shouldn't require a bunch of dodgy user-space
helpers to do its job.

I intend to work around this by compiling a suitable module for the LiveCD
kernel that I could directly insert the next time I get the chance. But please
add support for cifs in future and remove smbfs unless the tools are provided to
make it work (but I really don't think it's worth supporting smbfs).

I'd like to give my backing on dropping smbfs and enabling CIFs as well.
There have been a few times when this would have come in handy, and as Kerin
rightly mentioned, samba being implemented properly on the livecd would mean a
major size increase. Bare minimum tools are pointless when there is a completely
suitable alternative which is in many ways better.

just my 2p

I've already got CIFS support setup for 2006.0's release.  Also, the InstallCD
kernel is the same used on the LiveCD, since I don't want to maintain multiple
configs, so I am leaving smbfs enabled, as I know as soon as I disable it,
somebody will ask for it to be enabled.  Also, the LiveCD has samba, so it has
all the mount tools.

This is fixed with the 2005.1-r1 release media.