Look into talloc, used inside Samba (and other FLOSS projects like sssd). Exactly this.

Tests. All changes must have tests. If they're generating the code, they can generate the tests too.

who reviews the tests? again me? -> that's exactly why I am saying review is a bottleneck, especially with current tooling, which doesn't show second order impacts of the changes and its not easy to reason about when method gets called by 10 other methods with 4 level of parent hierarchy

Fantastic summary of the early days by tridge !

Over 20+ years in the design and making. Amazing to see it finally rolled out in production ! NFS shuffles one step closer to the grave :-).

I had 4 SONOS connect devices (S1 app only) doing exactly this. I recently (last month) replaced them all with BlueSound node nano devices. They do exactly what you require - point it at the SMB server and away they go.

Bonus is they do it over SMB2 allowing me to switch off SMB1 which I'd previously had to keep running for the SONOS devices.

The SONOS connects are going to goodwill.

The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers from SerNet will tackle 17 key development sub-projects aimed at enhancing Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.

Cracks in the Ice: Why a 'frozen' distribution Linux kernel isn't the safest choice for security:

https://ciq.com/blog/why-a-frozen-linux-kernel-isnt-the-safe...

This is an executive summary of research that my colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple did, published as a whitepaper with all the numeric details here:

https://ciq.com/whitepaper/vendor-kernels-bugs-stability/

Amen to this. I recall the original Western Digital WD TV Media Player.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/western-digital-wd-tv-media-pla...

Used to attach to a local NAS. Swiftly knee-caped to do "streaming only" and thus became utterly dependent on third-party services.

I'd recommend the OSMC Vero as the only good replacement for it:

https://osmc.tv/vero/

Samba doesn't use the passwords or users in /etc/passwd directly. You have to map any SMB users into /etc/passwd users in Sambas database. Without that mapping they don't exist for Samba.

My recollection of that time (I was at SGI when Belluzzo was there).

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...