06-16-2017 06:23 AM
Greetings
Microsoft is soon disabling SMB1 in Windows (Microsoft to Disable SMBv1 in Windows Starting This Fall ).
In the light of that, does the Alfresco SMB/CIFS Server support SMB2 or SMB3? I'm especially interested in the Java based implementation which runs on non-Windows systems.
Thank you
Yves Noirjean
06-19-2017 10:10 AM
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When we have looked at upgrading to a newer version of the SMB protocol, it is an expensive undertaking.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:
Am I missing anything?
Is anyone willing to share a use case shared drives where WebDAV would not be adequate?
06-19-2017 12:57 AM
For quite a while now Community members have urged Alfresco to update its SMB implementation. The issue REPO-1393 was filed by product manager Richard Esplin to track the requirement. But there is no indication that this is something that will get any sort of priority from Alfresco, e.g. from the strategic vision / product roadmap presentations we had at BeeCon. Also the argument may be that even when Microsoft disabled SMBv1 by default, it will always be just a registry setting to re-enable it.
06-19-2017 10:10 AM
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:
Am I missing anything?
Is anyone willing to share a use case shared drives where WebDAV would not be adequate?
06-20-2017 02:11 AM
Hello.
I apologize in advance if I am in something wrong. All statements are based on personal experience using WebDav.
At first glance, WebDav looks very attractive, but on closer inspection it turns out that this is not true.
The WebDav protocol has a number of drawbacks, compared to SMB:
06-20-2017 08:16 AM
Thank you for the analysis Dilan Hant. This is exactly the sort of information I was looking for. It will be interesting to see what others think about this topic.
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