Frequently Asked Questions
All Visuality Systems products support all SMB versions, from SMB1 and SMB2 up to the latest SMB3.1.1.
Yes, SMBv1 can be removed by modifying the NQ product configuration file.
All Visuality Systems solutions support SMB3.1.1 with the latest security practices. NQ is tightly secure by means of message signing (Hashing with CMAC algorithm), encryption (AES-CCM and AES-GCM algorithms), Active Directory, and Kerberos authentications and pre-logon integrity.
No. All Visuality Systems solutions were developed in-house from scratch and do not contain any open source usage.
Yes, we offer both updates and upgrades to clients. Typically an update is delivered once a month and a major upgrade is done once or twice a year. The R&D team also invites customers to raise feature requests through the support desk and offer ideas for new feature development.
Visuality Systems offers the NQ products license package with the right to use the software, the Microsoft IP rights, access to the on-line support desk and periodical updates for the agreed period of time. Typically updates are delivered to customers once a month and a major upgrade is done once or twice a year.
Before each release there is a QA cycle, the cycle depends on release. Visuality has 3 types of releases: Major Release – Full QA Cycle that could take up to two months; Build Release – Build QA Cycle that contains new feature checking, regression tests and more. This cycle length is at least one month; Support Release – Support QA Cycle, regression and specific test for the issues that were fixed. This cycle could take between 3 to 7 days.
Visuality Systems customers receive full access to the 24/7 support desk. By logging into the system, a ticket can promptly be opened, whether it is a question, issue, or a feature request. The support team review tickets frequently and feedback is provided in up to one business day.
NQ products come with various documentation. For example: porting and integration guide, API documentation, example codes, and more. Most of the documentation is provided in PDF and HTML formats.
Yes. Visuality Systems NQ license includes the Microsoft IP rights to use the SMB patents. Visuality Systems customers do not have to pay additional costs to Microsoft for SMB rights.
Yes. Any cloud which supports SMB can seamlessly be connected to another server. This is made possible as NQ products support all SMB versions including SMB3, which is necessary to connect to a number of clouds such as Microsoft Azure.
Yes, there are several products that can register the machine to AD. Those products are YNQ Corporate Client and YNQ Corporate Server. SMB3, which is necessary to connect to a number of clouds such as Microsoft Azure.
Yes, YNQ Corporate Server can authenticate AD users using the passthrough method after registration to the AD.
Yes. YNQ can be integrated into any iOS application as a client or as a server. jNQ is Java-based and can be integrated into any Android application.
HTTP and FTP can be used for file transfer between devices. However, they are not capable of providing file-sharing functionalities. In contrast, the SMB protocol supports remote file sharing access, thus enabling groups of embedded devices to work together and share documents across any network. Using SMB file sharing instead of HTTP and FTP file transfer eliminates the need to transfer files between devices, which in turn reduces the need for expensive storage space and speeds up overall response time. The SMB protocol is used not only for File Sharing but also to query info from the OS using RPC messages.
To begin, To begin, fill in your contact information in the evaluation form and a Visuality Systems representative will contact you within the same business day.
YNQ™ is a CIFS / SMB file sharing middleware solution for embedded operating systems. Using YNQ™, embedded devices based on VxWorks, ThreadX, Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, iOS, and other operating systems can be quickly connected to Windows-centric networks whilst providing full file and printer sharing capabilities.
File sharing enables multiple devices to remotely browse each other’s shared folders, and to read, write, edit, copy, delete and update these files. All of these operations can be done without the need to transfer entire files to/from the device’s local disk or memory. Using file sharing, embedded devices are able to reduce precious and costly storage space requirements as well as speed up response by eliminating the time needed to transfer files. File sharing also enables multiple devices to access and update the same file, while preventing conflicts with sophisticated file-sharing and locking semantics. All of the above are fundamental requirements for embedded device networks.
YNQ™ implements the Browser Host Announcement mechanism, which allows devices to automatically appear on any PC in the form of icons under “My Network Places” (or “Network Neighborhood”). Users are not required to perform complex installation procedures, configurations or driver installations when setting up and connecting devices to the network. For any end user familiar with the Windows environment, working with “My Network Places” is simple and intuitive, thus making the embedded device application easier to install and deploy.
Windows is by far the dominant operating system today, accounting for over 90% of computers worldwide. As the embedded systems market and applications expand, so does the need to provide file-sharing connectivity with Windows-based networks. And since SMB /CIFS is the native file sharing protocol and the basis for all Windows networks, it is the natural choice.
Samba provides full SMB (CIFS) file sharing implementation available only for Unix / Linux platforms. YNQ™ is however easily portable to any platform. YNQ™ has a much smaller footprint and provides high level of customization. Furthermore, YNQ™ grants a commercial license, while modern Samba comes under GPL3 (general public license level 3). Finally, Visuality Systems provide a 24/7 customer support by email, phone or even on premise to guide through integration steps, provide fixes if needed and send periodical updates.
In contrast to FTP, which copies files, SMB protocol grants file sharing. For instance, a text editor or MS Word, when working over SMB, opens a remote file in its original location. Besides, SMB provides better performance and grants higher security level.
NFS is only natively available on Linux/Unix platforms. Using it on a Windows machine is not easy, if at all possible. Besides, NFS is considered to be less secure than the encrypted SMB protocol.
YNQ™ was successfully ported to tens of different platforms. Once your OS provides a TCP/IP stack, YNQ™ Client will run on it. For YNQ™ Server, you will also need a local file system. Adopting YNQ™ to another OS is called “porting”.
This process is very well documented in “YNQ™ Porting and Integration Guide”. Also, we provide a 24/7 hotline for your engineers, as well as email support. In a more complicated case, our engineer can come to your location for onsite assistance.
This refers to fine tuning per project. Even after being ported to your OS, YNQ™ may require additional adjustment on a per-project basis.
Yes, YNQ Standalone Server is a specific product for a workgroup environment. There are two NQ tools that provide the ability to add local users:
1.pwd_generator is a tool to generate a local user that can be added into the YNQ Server configuration file – not in run-time.
2. Nqctrl is a tool provided to add users (and do more operations) to the process in run-time.
jNQ API is straightforward and intuitive, allowing for a quick start in just a couple of hours. In addition, jNQ documentation comes with a number of complete examples that demonstrate the many features of the product.
jNQ offers concurrent reads and writes. It also caches DFS entries (see question about DFS), SID (security identifier) entries and hostnames.
Yes, jNQ supports inputFileStream and OutputFileStream.
jNQ is fully thread-safe. It has been tested in multi-thread environments.
Yes, this is available through several Kerberos options.
jNQ supports all means of authentication available with SMB – Kerberos and NTLMSSP.
Each jNQ release is tested with a rich set of tests, which include: functional tests which enumerate all possible combinations of the jNQ API, performance tests, stress tests, including concurrent executions to test multi-threaded environments.
jNQ was thoroughly tested on Oracle Java, IBM Java, and several Android platforms.
jNQ includes the framework code to write specialized RPC client calls. The Javadocs documentation shows the steps needed to implement such a feature.
jNQ includes APIs for LSA (Local Security Authority), SAM (Security Accounts Manager), and WINREG (Windows Registry).
jNQ supports all dialects of SMB: SMB1, 2.02, 2.10, 3.00, 3.02, 3.11.
jNQ includes an API that (based on permissions) discovers shares, domains, and servers. Server discovery depends on network configuration. jNQ will additionally use WS-Discovery to discover servers.
Accordion jNQ completely supports DFS. It caches DFS referral entries to eliminate fetching DFS entries on subsequent requests content.
Yes, jNQ can connect over any SMB dialect, starting from SMB1 up to the latest SMB version.
No, jNQ comes with a commercial licence.
jNQ is the only viable, commercial Java SMB solution that comes with round-the-clock client assistance.
jNQ is the only Java SMB solution that supports SMB 3.1.1 with its pre-logon authentication. According to Microsoft, pre-logon authentication provides for the strongest prevention against a possible breach of SMB traffic.
An evaluation package is available. To obtain the evaluation package, please contact Visuality Systems throught the evaluation form.
The jNQ package comes with complete documentation in Javadoc format.
With NFS, your solution will be limited to Data Centers with Linux/Unix machines only. When Windows machines are involved, SMB becomes a must.With NFS, your solution will be limited to Data Centers with Linux/Unix machines only. When Windows machines are involved, SMB becomes a must.
Generally speaking, it is not. NQ™ Storage is a front-end for an existing Storage solution. NQ™ Storage comes with an off-the-shelf solution for Linux platforms. You can use this solution as a standalone server, but not as a cluster.
In addition to porting and integration efforts, NQ™ Storage requires integration with a distributed file system backend, which requires another API.
Yes. NQ™ Storage was successfully tested as a front-end of several applications, such as Hyper-V, SQL Server, Shadow Copy.
Yes. NQ™ Storage includes SMBD over RDMA transport module. It was tested over NVIDIA Infiniband cards.
NQ™ Storage supports all SMB dialects up to the latest SMB3.1.1