I saw that news over the weekend, and we have been discussing it is a team.
CIFS is a specific dialect of SMBv1, and so is likely to stop working when Microsoft disables their client support for it. Our implementation of CIFS is vulnerable to many of the security problems mentioned in the Microsoft blog post, and so for some time we have recommended people use WebDAV in environments where those risks are considered unacceptable.
As Axel Faust has pointed out, Alfresco has not invested in improving our SMB support since Alfresco version 4.0. That work was to improve the performance and stability of the current implementation, and we have not done the work to support newer versions of that protocol.
When we have looked at upgrading to a newer version of the SMB protocol, it is an expensive undertaking. We have instead directed our resources to other areas, such as improving WebDAV and the new SharePoint support in the AOS library.
The news from Microsoft has forced us to re-evaluate our position with SMB/CIFS. There are some new libraries we could leverage for this support, but integrating them would still be a big project. I wonder if it isn't better to end-of-life our CIFS support and recommend WebDAV for all use cases required mounting Alfresco as a shared drive.
Here is my analysis of WebDAV versus SMBv3.1.1:
- WebDAV is superior to modern versions of SMB when used for file access over a high-latency network. This is increasingly important as more deployments are in AWS or some other public cloud.
- WebDAV has worse performance than SMBv3.1.1 on a local network.
- WebDAV cannot handle transferring files larger than 4GB, so something like FTP would have to be used for those cases.
Am I missing anything?
Is anyone willing to share a use case shared drives where WebDAV would not be adequate?
