From: Kevin Keane on
You would probably need to define a few more things. Specifically, what does "discoverable" mean, how much legacy Windows do you want to support? And also, how much engineering time do you want to spend?

Generally, I'm sure you can go lower than 22mb. There are quite a few low-end NAS devices out there, and they probably are more stripped down than that. Unfortunately, they also often make bad assumptions about the network, and may break with the latest versions of Windows.

Discoverable can mean a hodgepodge of things:

- NetBIOS broadcasts (which is deprecated)
- WINS server (also deprecated)
- Active directory integration/DNS
- mDNS/Avahi/Bonjour (primarily for OSX, but also for Windows. Hint: if your device has a Web interface, be sure to advertise it!)
- UPnP/Network Discovery/LLTD and siblings.

And a few more.

Also, do you want to support IPv4 or only IPv6? Do you want to support NetBT, or only SMB over TCP? It may be a bit too early to retire NetBT or IPv4, but if you can, you can completely eliminate the nmbd daemon, and probably a good chunk of code within Samba itself. However, you would be limiting yourself to Vista or later.

Please do not make the mistake of limiting yourself to IPv4 only - that would be like writing a program with two-digit years in 1999! Unfortunately, Samba still has some limits when it comes to IPv6.

You can probably completely eliminate anything related to Samba as domain controller. Maybe also support for Samba as a domain member; many low-end devices seem to be doing that (although I think supporting domain membership is an important feature).

You can probably eliminate support for printing.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-bounces(a)lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-
> bounces(a)lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Lasse Lorenzen
> Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 5:52 AM
> To: samba(a)lists.samba.org
> Subject: [Samba] How small can a compiled smbd/nmd be?
>
> Hi.
>
> We have some interest in using samba as a file server on a small
> device,
> but we have some problems with low amount of space on our target
> machine,
> the question is how low can we go?
>
> So far we have just made a quick samba packages that requires 22mb of
> space, however since we are not experts on samba, it could be us that
> are
> stupid :)
> What we want to have is a:
>
> Samba server that is discoverable by windows and osx machines.
> only needs to support one user.
> Just file write support, everything else as printing ect is irrelevant
> for
> our problem.
>
> Can we compile a small version of samba that just gives us this, or is
> 22mb (or similar) the best we can do?
>
> If you need any more info, or have suggestions to other techs please
> let
> me know.
>
> Best Regards
> Lasse Lorenzen
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