I had 4 SONOS connect devices (S1 app only) doing exactly this. I recently (last month) replaced them all with BlueSound node nano devices. They do exactly what you require - point it at the SMB server and away they go.
Bonus is they do it over SMB2 allowing me to switch off SMB1 which I'd previously had to keep running for the SONOS devices.
The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development sub-projects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.
This is an executive summary of research that my colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple did, published as a whitepaper with all the numeric details here:
Samba doesn't use the passwords or users in /etc/passwd directly. You have to map any SMB users into /etc/passwd users in Sambas database. Without that mapping they don't exist for Samba.
No one in these days of cyber attacks should be shipping unknown third party dependencies. How could you fix unknown dependencies in case of severe CVE's in them ? Unknown third party dependencies are a sign of utter amateur incompetence in product development.
Once you have all third party dependencies cataloged, licence compliance should just shake out in the wash.
FYI. This is my recollection of events, but it's been twenty or so years now, so if my memory is fuzzy on the details, please forgive the ramblings of an old engineer :-).
Many years ago, I was working at SGI when the company started to do poorly under the leadership of Rick Belluzzo. In those days the company sponsored the Friday afternoon "beer-bust", when all the employees hung out on what is now the Google volleyball court, drank beer and socialized. Rick cancelled the beer busts as a cost cutting measure.
One of SGI's lead engineers, Casey Leedom (known internally as Mr. IRIX, for SGI's version of UNIX - a codebase he knew inside-out) took it upon himself to self-organize replacement beer-busts with the rest of the engineering staff. We all chipped in to buy the beer, and the Friday afternoon festivities continued as normal.
Rick Belluzzo heard about this, and embarrassed, called Casey into a meeting. "Things aren't that bad", he told Casey. "We can fund the beer-busts again". "No", said Casey. "We know the company is having some hard times, and we're all in this together, so the engineering staff are happy to continue to self-fund the beer-busts".
"There is one thing you could do", Casey added. "I know you are a busy man, but if you could take it upon yourself to occasionally attend a beer-bust, it would be much appreciated by the employees".
"Great idea !", said Rick, and promised to do so. Six or so months later, Rick Belluzzo ran away from SGI over a weekend, and on Monday it was announced that Microsoft had a new VP. "We appear to have lost our CEO" was the email announcement from now acting CEO Bob Bishop.
In the time since Casey asked him to the time he joined Microsoft, Rick attended zero self-sponsored beer busts at SGI.
For some reason I can't see Sundar attending any self-sponsored Google beer-busts either.
This is very true. As an exmaple, Ian Hickson's blog post explaining the real reason behind DRM was posted on Google+ and is now completely unavailable (at least I can't find the original text anywhere).
Here is an open web page describing what he wrote (with some quotes), but the original text ? Gone along with G+.
I am a personal friend of Chris, and was with him through most of his tenure at Google (we both got laid off at the same time). When Chris said no (and it was rare), it was usually because people were thinking of themselves over the good of the company (and usually around personal projects they wanted to own instead of Google).
You might disagree with it (and I'm sure you do), but Chris always thought of the company first. He was the personal embodiment of early Google culture and a fantastic manager.
I just wish they'd made him a VP of Open Source (a position IMHO Google sorely needs). He probably could have staved off some of the failures.
I used to "share" an office with Hixie at Google. Hixie used to store his board game collection in the office we nominally "shared", but he himself very rarely visited. I liked that just fine (let's just say I'm not a fan of "open" shared office spaces). My fondest Google office memories were sharing an office with Hixie, and "Mr Big Printer" which the Google Open Source Team used to print posters. We made an office CD label for "Mr Big Printer".
Have you tried running Samba on top of cunoFS ? I'd be interested in performance data on that. For SMB3 access it might be better to add a Samba VFS vfs_cunoFS interface directly. You won't need to open source your client code, just the wrapper.