Yiffzer said:
Just to be clear: By OS transparent, you mean that it's not OS dependable, right? Pretty wicked English there.
Thanks.
-J.
It's not OS dependent because of the way network filesystems work. Filesystems on a hard drive aim at filling a partition in a partition table (which is, itself, a very simple filesystem) with a long string of ones and zeros. This is an overly simplistic thing, but if you think about it, a filesystem's main purpose is to index files, create a hierarchy that the user can logically perceive in some way, and determine where one 'file' begins and ends in the continuity of the drive.
Operating systems (unless they use only one filesystem, but having no means to support other filesystems creates a problem with future releases if you want to use a different version, not to mention it's harder to write software this way) typically abstract the means by which the filesystem works by creating a series of API calls that perform fundamental functions rather than having developers manually remove files by having them use low-level drive access.
The fundamental functions are create (create a file in the filesystem hierarchy and add its name to the index), delete (remove a file in the filesystem hierarchy and remove its name from the index), copy (make a copy of a file, and add the copy to the filesystem's hierarchy and index) move (change the location of a file in the filesystem hierarchy, which will often only slightly changes the index) and modify (write data, remove data from, whether or not it actually changes the length of the file).
All filesystems provide these five core concepts, and it's the OS's job to provide an API and a set of tools which use this API in order to perform these operations.
Network filesystems, however, do not perform such low-level actions to the drive. Rather, they use the OS's API to make calls in a fashion that is transparent regardless of which FS the drive or partition uses. When I create a Samba share on my Linux box, the filesystem my box is using can be ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, HFS, BFS, BeFS, FAT32, NTFS or any of the other filesystems Linux is capable of using. Samba and other network FSs simply provide a mechanism of sharing that is not dependent on what FS the system is actually using. By providing this abstraction, any operating system that supports SMB/Samba (such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.) can mount, unmount, and modify the share by making drive calls according to the SMB protocol.
A very verbose answer, but yes. By transparent, I mean that so long as the OS supports SMB (ie Windows) or Samba (most Unix and Unix-like systems, including OS X), can use as if it were part of the system itself.
