Specifications

CHAPTER 4. DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE 23

AllowOverride and Order are options for the directive Directory with their corresponding

values.

AllowOverride All

Order deny, allow

</Directory>

Samba uses a conﬁguration ﬁle format which was derived from the .ini ﬁles used by

Microsoft Windows 3.1. This format is divided into sections. Each section has one or more

options with a corresponding value. The following example shows the sections [global] and

[share1]. Two options (workgroup and netbios name) are deﬁned for the section [global],

for section share1, only one option (path) is supplied.

[global]

workgroup = WORKGROUPNAME

netbios name = NETBIOSNAME

[share1]

path = /home

The parsing of the conﬁguration ﬁle can be shifted by using an external library, such as

the XML C parser Libxml2 (libxml2). Libxml2 implements a decent number of standards like

XML, XPath, HTML4 and others. A complete list can be obtained on the project home page

located at http://www.xmlsoft.org/. Furthermore, Libxml2 is available for many platforms.

A notional example for a conﬁguration ﬁle format using XML would be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<num_node>1</num_node>

<alpha_node>string</alpha_node>

<complex_node attribute=attribute_value>

</complex_node>

</configuration>

The second approach to conﬁgure the Input Abstraction Layer daemon are command line

options. It is common to use the command line parser getopt(3) to implement the com-

mand line interface. Since the options deﬁned in the conﬁguration ﬁle interleave with options

passed by the command line, it is necessary to specify which source for the daemon options

is more signiﬁcant. Command line options are convenient for setting speciﬁc daemon options

temporarily—e.g. to test a feature or to change the debug level. Based on this fact, it is

sensible to determine the sequence for the evaluation of options: