This document describes how to make use the new RPC Pluggable Modules features of Samba 3.0. This architecture was added to increase the maintainability of Samba allowing RPC Pipes to be worked on separately from the main CVS branch. The RPM architecture will also allow third-party vendors to add functionality to Samba through plug-ins.

When an RPC call is sent to smbd, smbd tries to load a shared library by the name librpc_<pipename>.so to handle the call if it doesn't know how to handle the call internally. For instance, LSA calls are handled by librpc_lsass.so.. These shared libraries should be located in the <sambaroot>/lib/rpc. smbd then attempts to call the init_module function within the shared library. Check the chapter on modules for more information.

In the init_module function, the library should call rpc_pipe_register_commands(). This function takes the following arguments:

NTSTATUS rpc_pipe_register_commands(int version, const char *clnt, const char *srv,
                               const struct api_struct *cmds, int size);

See rpc_server/srv_reg.c and rpc_server/srv_reg_nt.c for a small example of how to use this library.