The Report of Assessment on Qi.

Wu’s
Presentation

Leike Zhou
22,October,2010

Qi Wu(Tommy)gave a presentation on the topic of SMB/CIFS protocol, which stand for

‘Server Message Block’ and ‘Common Internet File System’, separately.
SMB operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used to provide shared access
to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a
network.

Structure
Tommy’s presentation is well organized. The presentation was divided into 5 sub
topics, ’Time-line of SMB’, ‘How it works’, Structure of SMP, Security and Implementations of
SMP. Besides a brief introduction of the presentation was given in the beginning to help us
have a brief understanding about SMP and what is going to be discussed.

Knowledge
The presentation delivered a lot of knowledge about SMB(CIFS), to tell us about the
evolution of SMB, following with some principles and critical concepts such as SMBA, SMB
frames, negprot SMB, reading and writing SMB. Further more, Tommy used an example to
show how SMB works on network, which I assumed the best part of the presentation
because it is quite difficult to understand how does a protocol work only by research the
principles and algorithms, the example show us the process clearly and it is helpful for
understanding the next part of the presentation, the SMB Frame. After that, the two levels of
security were described, share level and user level. However, I think Tommy just introduced
the security strategy too briefly and I am not quite sure about it. For the last part, the
Implementations of SMB were introduced as ‘SMB Protocol Variants’ and ‘SMB Clients and
Servers Available’

Delivery
The delivery was quite understandable. As a non-native speaker of English, I think Tommy did a
good job. I got a confused about the authority of SMB during the presentation but I consider that
is because the condition between Micro Soft and IBM is really complicated.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I give this presentation a score 8. And I really think it is interesting and gain
knowledge in it.