http://lkcl.net/namedpipes/namedpipes-emulation.txt
this specification is intended to be implemented as a library, similar to a systems library that provides for example TCP/IP in userspace. thus it could easily be utilised by samba, samba tng, samba 4, apache runtime or in fact any POSIX-compliant system that intends to offer interoperable "Windows NT Named Pipe Emulation".
the purpose of the document is to provide a guide to creating emulated implementation of Windows NT Named Pipes. implementors could use this to communicate between clients and servers inside their applications (such as the Wine application), with the added benefit that additional applications (such as the Samba application) that also conformed to the specification could interoperate. For example, the creation of a NamedPipe inside a Samba service could be talked to by a Wine client, and vice-versa.
ultimately the specification _could_ potentially be used as a guide to writing a kernel-level implementation of Windows NT Named Pipes emulation.
Note that this specification does NOT include "transfer of data over a network", as that task is carried out by SMB clients and SMB servers utilising SMBopenX, SMBclose, SMBreadX, SMBwriteX and SMBtrans2 subcommands 0x1, 0x26 and 0x53 to represent SetNPHS, WaitNamedPipe and TransactNamedPipe.
Note that this specification does NOT have the API of the Win32 functions it is intended to emulate but is instead based very much on the design of the SMB protocols (much simplified), and thus provides an exact topological mapping of all SMB operations necessary to provide full Named Pipes functionality.
Missing from the specification (but mandatory) at this time is PeekNamedPipe and GetNamedPipeHandleState, because it is clear that the functionality inside of Samba is entirely missing support for such (see call_trans2qpipeinfo in samba 3 smbd/trans2.c source code). Research WILL be required at a later stage in the form of running Win32 test applications, along with examination of the resultant network traffic, in order to determine the necessary support inside Samba for these two vital Named Pipe operations. From the design of Wine, and the stub code in smbd/trans2.c it is likely that these two functions will simply be direct mappings from NtQueryFileInformation #defines onto Trans2_QueryFileInfo, with blindingly obvious parameters and data structures to anyone familiar with both dlls/ntdll/file.c in Wine, and smbd/trans2.c in Samba.
l.
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Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton