1.3 Overview

The Server Service Remote Protocol is designed for remotely querying and configuring a Server Message Block (SMB) server on a remote computer. By using this protocol, a client can query and configure information on the server such as active connections, sessions, shares, files, and transport protocols. Clients can also query and configure the server itself, for instance by setting the server's type, changing the services that are running on the server, or getting a list of all servers of a specific type in a domain.

A server can be configured to present different resources based on the name the client connects with, allowing it to appear as multiple, distinct servers. This is achieved by scoping a share to a specific name, and hosting all of the names on the same server.

The server can also configure one or more aliases, identifying that multiple distinct names present the same resources. For example, the administrator could choose to expose the same shares for the name "server" and "server.example.com" by creating an alias indicating that "server. example.com" is the same as "server". The SMB client will connect using the name provided by the calling applications, and is not aware whether the name is the server's default machine name, an additionally configured name, or an alias. For more information, see the example in section 4.3.

This is an RPC-based protocol. The server does not maintain client state information. No sequence of method calls is imposed on this protocol, with the exception of net share deletion, which requires a two-phase commit, net file get information, and net file close.