Samba and Snapper: Previous Versions with Windows Explorer

Snapper is a neat application for managing snapshots atop a Btrfs filesystem.

The upcoming release of Samba 4.2 will offer integration with Snapper, providing the ability to expose snapshots to remote Windows clients using the previous versions feature built into Windows Explorer, as demonstrated in the following video:

The feature can be enabled on a per-share basis in smb.conf, e.g.:

...
[share]
        vfs objects = snapper
        path = /mnt/btrfs_fs

The share path must correspond to a Btrfs subvolume, and have an associated Snapper configuration. Additionally, Snapper must be configured to grant users snapshot access - see the vfs_snapper man page for more details.

Many thanks to:

• Arvin Schnell and other Snapper developers.
• My colleagues at SUSE Linux, and fellow Samba Team members, for supporting my implementation efforts.
• Kdenlive developers, for writing a great video editing suite.

Using the Azure File Service on Linux

Update 2025-11-13: This post is ancient, so should not be used as a reference.
The Microsoft Azure File Service is a new SMB shared-storage service offered on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

The service allows for the instant provisioning of file shares for private access by cloud provisioned VMs using the SMB 2.1 protocol, and additionally supports public access via a new REST interface.

Update 2015-05-25, edit 2025: File shares can now also not be provisioned from Linux using Elasto.

Linux VMs deployed on Azure can make use of this service using the Linux Kernel CIFS client. The kernel client must be configured to support and use the SMB 2.1 protocol dialect:

• CONFIG_CIFS_SMB2 must be enabled in the kernel configuration at build time
• Use

  # zcat /proc/config.gz | grep CONFIG_CIFS_SMB2

  to check this on a running system.

• The vers=2.1 mount.cifs parameter must be provided at mount time.
• Furthermore, the Azure storage account and access key must be provided as username and password.

# mount.cifs -o vers=2.1,user=smb //smb.file.core.windows.net/share /share/
Password for smb@//smb.file.core.windows.net/share:  ******...
# df -h /share/
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
//smb.file.core.windows.net/share  5.0T     0  5.0T   0% /share

This feature will be supported with the upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, and future openSUSE releases.

Disclaimer: I work in the Labs department at SUSE.