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Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

Imagine being able to have your music collection centralized at home on ONE MACHINE. NOT files strewn about all over the place, but one centralized location.

I run a grad-school lab, and what we do sounds a lot like what you need.

I think you're saying that you have a single account on each machine that every student logs in as. If that's the case, enable the "Guest" account, and let students use that (passwordless) account to log in. the Guest account has the tightest restrictions, and most of the things you can change as Guest get wiped away by a simple reboot. This is what we do, with the systems set to automatically log in as Guest - see http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_passwords.h tm for details.

If I'm wrong, and you need individual accounts for each student, then you'll need Windows XP Pro on every machine and some flavor of domain controller (SaMBa does a dandy job for us). Make your student accounts members of the "Domain Guests" group, and viola!

One other note: ditch the "administrator" account. It's trivial to find tools that will let a person reset the password of the default "administrator" account. Create another administrator-level account, then delete or disable "administrator".

This being Slashdot, somebody of course suggested that you "put Linux on it", but in this case they might be on the right track. We have a general-use lab that is running Ubuntu with Crossover Office, and the users are happy as clams (and these aren't techies, folks - these are writers, pastors, and chaplains). We use a single shared unprivileged account with automatic login (similar to what I described above for Windows), and everything works beautifully. It's also more stable than the Windows lab, which makes everybody happy!

If all you are worried about is compile time, the samba team have come up with distcc and ccache for distributed compiling and a compiler cache respectively. Using this set up a network with four computers with four cores would be able to use 16 cores with make -j 16 for a faster first time compile. The recompile would be faster because the compiler would only have to compile the parts that would actually change.

I don't code for a living, but it does seem to speed up gentoo when I am playing with emerge.

http://distcc.samba.org/
http://ccache.samba.org/

If all you are worried about is compile time, the samba team have come up with distcc and ccache for distributed compiling and a compiler cache respectively. Using this set up a network with four computers with four cores would be able to use 16 cores with make -j 16 for a faster first time compile. The recompile would be faster because the compiler would only have to compile the parts that would actually change.

I don't code for a living, but it does seem to speed up gentoo when I am playing with emerge.

http://distcc.samba.org/
http://ccache.samba.org/

I set up Mac-on-Linux (MOL) to run Canon's proprietary driver in OSX and export the printer to the network from the MOL virtual host. (MOL makes that all fairly easy.) Now I can print from any host on the LAN. The only drawback is that I need to have both the physical and virtual hosts up to print. Right now I do that manually, but I am working on running MOL at boot time so I only need start the physical machine, which is what I would have to do even if there were Linux drivers for the printer.

I haven't tried running the Windows driver (since I have a Mac hardware), but I am pretty sure one could also set up an x86 emulator, such as Qemu, to run the proprietary Canon driver in Windows to achieve the same effect. For all I know, it might work better. I'm not sure how easy it would be to export the printer to the LAN, but I suspect it would involve Samba.

Sure, it was a pain to set up, but it works and works well. Long term? I probably won't buy another Canon unless they start supporting open source drivers like they used to. HP and Epson still support open source drivers, but HP seems to be taking a beating for reduced quality, judging by the comments above. Fewer comments seem to condemn Epson's quality so that is what I will likely buy the next time. Either that or I will finally save up for a postscript laser printer.

For me, I run my network with distcc (http://distcc.samba.org/) So all of my Gentoo boxes can compile using shared computing power. It cut a typical 33Min app down to less then 2 mins doing this. And works wonders for my slower laptop.

And don't forget, ccache can work with distcc, for an even bigger speedup...

For me, I run my network with distcc (http://distcc.samba.org/) So all of my Gentoo boxes can compile using shared computing power. It cut a typical 33Min app down to less then 2 mins doing this. And works wonders for my slower laptop.

And don't forget, ccache can work with distcc, for an even bigger speedup...

I have a stack of five origional Pentium boxes with 32mb of RAM and 2gb harddrives (except for one, with a larger drive for a software repository). Origionally built it to experiment with AFAPI based clustering, but since AFAPI is a reasonably non-invasive setup, it works well for trying other techniques too, everthing from simply running distcc on the nodes to speed up i586 software builds to briefly fiddling about with some of the other clustering options mentioned. Fiddling around with options on a real cluster (running cluster software on a single node really isn't a good impression) that could be reinstalled from scratch in a few hours, and the machines aren't worth enough to matter if it is physically damanged is a great way to learn.

I've found that most people I know that wanted to build a cluster, when asked why, replied something to the effect of "for the coolness factor... and to compile things faster."

I tried to set up 5 node (7 processor) distributed compile farm for a while which let me build gentoo packages with blazing speed. unfortunately, I couldn't get cross compiling to work, nor could I get XCode integration working, so in the end, I had a 400mhz G3 and a 800mhz G4 doing distributed builds with distcc and a 1ghz and a dual 600mhz Pentium3 set up with distcc as well.

my G5 was stuck in OSX and xcode, but it's fast enough, I guess. =P

Don't believe me? Ok. Andrew Tridgell from the Samba team has some experience with this. Here's what he has to say about the topic:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/200 4-December/038301.html

Read how they figured stuff out att http://www.samba.org./
You cannot program for the network if you do not know the api they use.

Truce? How can there be a truce when only one side is the agressor? Tell you what, Microsoft, stop attacking OSS and trying to thwart our attempts at every turn, and then there will be a truce because we are already the peaceful side.

Common ground? We built it. We continue to build it. It's ours, but by the very definition of open source, we are willing to share it (and already do!) with you. All you have to do is come down off your high horse and stop fucking around with closed standards that benefit no one but yourself.

Microsoft needs to STFU, stop wasting money on FUD, and actually DO something that will PROVE they are all about cooperation and a truce. Like opening NTFS or CIFS, and not lobbying for laws that hinder open standards or open source.

What documentation issue?

There are boatloads of documentation available. Ever hear of The Linux Documentation Project? Plus, most distributions offer lots of very good documentation. Why there was a Slashdot story just two days ago about the excellent Ubuntu documentation. There are no fewer than 600 books available about Red Hat distros available for sale on Amazon. Not to mention that Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself includes lots of lots of documentation and most of it is available on the Web gratis. Plus the hundreds of open source apps that include very good documentation with their package. Have you actually read the documentation and free books available on the Samba website? It's darned good!

Any perceived documentation issue is Laura DiDiot's head.

I have setup a Linux server to server to both Mac and PC clients on the same volumes/shares using AFP with the Netatalk package, and SMB with Samba. Netatalk, in its new incarnations is by far the best non-apple AFP server available. It works seamlessly with modern OSX clients (10.3 and 10.4), supporting precomposed UTF-8 charactersets, long file names (most commercial NAS devices still only support the ancient appletalk implementation with 32 MacRoman charactersets and glacial unreliable performance) and even Bonjour/Zeroconf support.

Netatalk works surprisingly well with modern Samba versions (post 3.0) that support UTF-8 (and now even includes a netatalk module to ease compatibility), and both samba and netatalk hide one another's specific data from the other so that resource forks are kept and if the mswindows option is enabled in netatalk, the worst character problems (?\ etc in filenames) are safe.

What I would really love to see is a system that reliably combines these, PLUS NFS for Linux shares. The FreeNAS looks good, but seesm to be a bit on the young side without decent Mac support, and god knows there are enough Mac using companies that don't want to have to fork over money for XServes.

Here's a pretty OS-nonspecific example of cross-platform storage implementation. Some of it is about backups and may seem off-topic but is valuable as an example of how much you can mix platforms and OS to get what you need in network storage solutions.

We protect 3 Terabytes per night from 250 remote servers with a backup strategy using RSYNC. These include both Windows and Netware servers. Our centralized backup file server is a single Dell PowerEdge 2850 with dual Xeon CPUs which runs OpenSuse 10 and has a combination of both Dell Powervault RAID SCSI enclosures and LaCie Big Disk USB External drives attached. Using a fast server with an OS that we can tune gives us incredible multistream-capable throughput for network storage. Think about the speed required folks, 3 Terabytes in 12 hours from 250 hosts at 75 sites. (Well RSYNC means we don't send all the data, but still! ;-0 )

Then, each day, we back up the Linux box using a Windows server installed on a Dell Optiplex workstation box with a tape jukebox attached and running CA ArcServe. That way we get a daily snapshot to tape allowing us to do a scheduled rotation.

This means we are following the Golden Rule of Backups, which applies no matter how much data you back up, which is this: Always have 2 separate backup copies of important data. And it's better if they are different types of media. And with SANS and NAS solutions redundancy is critical. These acronyms should be called AIOB which stands for 'All In One Basket'

RSYNC has done what no commercial software seemed to be able to do: give us a good working backup system for our enterprise. It uses very efficient synchronization and compression algorithms to move the changes from our distributed servers. If you want this rig to do backups too I recommend considering it. Here's a link to the RSYNC Project:

http://rsync.samba.org/

Here's the Novell RSYNC forum:

http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/newsportal/t hread.php?group_id=1148&group=novell.forge.rsync.h elp

And here's a good resource for RSYNC on Windows:

http://art.wilderness.org.au/software/help_cygwin- rsync.shtml

Here are two more good RSYNC Windows links:

http://www.itefix.no/phpws/index.php?module=pagema ster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=6&MMN_position =23:23

http://www.nasbackup.com/

The NASBackup Project is a neat Open Source effort to make a gui-based RSYNC client for Windows. It works very well.

More info: RSYNC uses an algorithm that only sends the changes in the file systems. This algorithm is so efficient that i can even get down to only sending the changed blocks in an individual file without having to send the whole file. It works very well for us even over DSL/Cable speed connections. You want to optimize your entire I/O schema including all network layers as well as the way you read, write, and cache file and database operations on all connected hosts.

I hope this little bit of info helps you.

I tried a quick (and not terribly inspired) google on that and interestingly the top hit was a link to the samba developers' home page. To quote:

... to avoid any potential licensing issues we require that anyone who has signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty Free Agreement not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced specification. ...

So I wonder how accepting the samba team would be of patches from MS.

Also interesting, TFA is the third hit on google.

Here's the search I used: microsoft submits patches samba

Short for Dr. Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell. Furthermore Dr. Tridgell is not hirsuite. In a business suit he could look quite respectable:

http://samba.org/~tridge/

I also gather that he was a very impressive witness before European Court.

Now one problem with the "French Cafe" technique is that you can only learn words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other words? Say for example you want to learn to swear in French? You would try ordering something at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe or poking him in the eye when he gives you your order. As you are being kicked out you take copious notes on the words he uses.

Although its not for every file, some times, this can be a huge win. In my case, backing up 60 versions of a 700kb XML file, I get 500:1 compression, 30 times better than what bzip2 gives me. Anytime you have a file where you know that it will have redundancy across more than 900kb, but less than 900mb, rzip can win big.

It sounds that this company's program is a variation of this idea, designed with backups in mind and identify redundancy across tens or hundreds of gigabytes.

Yeah, this reminds me of rsync which I use for backups and many other things. It's not the same thing, and I guess this technology is better in the way that you can recover any backup, not just the latest. Rsync "simply" keeps two filesystems in sync by transferring only the changes, so if you delete something before backing up, you cannot recover it.

What I don't understand is this:

Samba serves as PDC/BDC (not using Active Directory yet)

Apparently, he's planning on running Active Directory on Linux?

That's something I'd like to see!

If only. The licence used makes it impossible for any Samba Devs to even look at the code.

Important: In order to avoid any potential licensing issues we require that anyone who has signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty Free Agreement not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced specification.

Or, you can use samba with the following in your smb.conf:

[global]
printing = cups
printcap name = cups

[print$]
comment = Printer Driver Download Area
# this path holds the driver structure
path = /etc/samba/drivers
browseable = no
guest ok = yes
read only = yes
write list = <user who is a printer admin>

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = no
public = yes
guest ok = yes
writable = no
printable = yes

The secret is to use the printer drivers on the Windows machine and send raw data to the printer, then you don't have to worry about drivers on the Linux box. Samba also supports "Point n'Print" where you can connect to a printer on \\server\printer and it will automatically download the drivers to your windows machine (only to be used in trusted environments).

You can upload these drivers to the Linux box using the commandline, but I found it far easier to use the Windows "Add Printer Wizard" to get these drivers onto the Linux box.

Or, you can use samba with the following in your smb.conf:

[global]
printing = cups
printcap name = cups

[print$]
comment = Printer Driver Download Area
# this path holds the driver structure
path = /etc/samba/drivers
browseable = no
guest ok = yes
read only = yes
write list = <user who is a printer admin>

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
browseable = no
public = yes
guest ok = yes
writable = no
printable = yes

The secret is to use the printer drivers on the Windows machine and send raw data to the printer, then you don't have to worry about drivers on the Linux box. Samba also supports "Point n'Print" where you can connect to a printer on \\server\printer and it will automatically download the drivers to your windows machine (only to be used in trusted environments).

You can upload these drivers to the Linux box using the commandline, but I found it far easier to use the Windows "Add Printer Wizard" to get these drivers onto the Linux box.

Oui, le French Cafe method:

http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt

Ha, if the EU wants decent specs and someone who understands how SMB actually works they better look to someone else besides MS.

Andrew Tridgell has some interesting things to say:

http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/talks/junkcode.pdf
http://samba.org/junkcode/
http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/junkcode/

Andrew Tridgell has some interesting things to say:

http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/talks/junkcode.pdf
http://samba.org/junkcode/
http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/junkcode/

Andrew Tridgell has some interesting things to say:

http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/talks/junkcode.pdf
http://samba.org/junkcode/
http://samba.org/ftp/unpacked/junkcode/

A place so boring that there is no choice but to get stuff done.

Samba seems to be doing just fine, considering they are not far from releasing Samba 4. http://nl.samba.org/samba/news/#4.0.0tp1

Can't wait till it hits ports as net/samba-devel

There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.

Last time I looked at his ccache sources (http://ccache.samba.org/) I thought they were a right dog's dinner; not at all an impressive piece of open source software on the software engineering front.

There's an easy way to answer that question... just look at his "signature"! In a shell:
man rsync
man samba

(or check out an equivalent webpage on rsync, or samba)

In the "Author" section he always writes it:
Andrew Tridgell (that's the name used in the wikipedia entry, too).

In the examples section of rsync, however, he writes:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~ftp/pub/samba/ nim-bus:"~ftp/pub/tridge/samba"

So I guess he uses "tridge" as a nickname for himself.

Seems I'm the only one around here who doesn't know who he is.... So here's the skinny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell
http://samba.org/~tridge

Don't forget all the work Tridge did in hacking the early Tivos so we could install Ethernet ports in them! The guy has had quite an impact on several projects, hardware and software.

Easy... as in SWAT?

Wrong!, it's "``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''" as described in The Free Software Definition. There's a direct link to it on the samba site ;)

There has been info about Samba 4 for some time. Andrew Bartlett wrote a year ago an interesting thesis about Samba 4 and Active Directory (PDF).

But the release of this TP is good news, I hope that the use of Microsoft's Active Directory as an authentication service for Linux systems is coming to an end. All what we need now is a nice GUI.

There has been info about Samba 4 for some time. Andrew Bartlett wrote a year ago an interesting thesis about Samba 4 and Active Directory (PDF).

But the release of this TP is good news, I hope that the use of Microsoft's Active Directory as an authentication service for Linux systems is coming to an end. All what we need now is a nice GUI.

There has been info about Samba 4 for some time. Andrew Bartlett wrote a year ago an interesting thesis about Samba 4 and Active Directory (PDF).

But the release of this TP is good news, I hope that the use of Microsoft's Active Directory as an authentication service for Linux systems is coming to an end. All what we need now is a nice GUI.

Australia has the unfortunate tendency to blindly accept these imports - software being a significant and costly example. The so-called "Free Trade Agreement" codifies and enforces this disastrous situation (thankyou Mr Howard), right down to "fixing" our patent system and making our continent safe for US multinationals. The inevitable, if unmentionable, corollary is that local interests (such as the independent developer you mentioned) are completely compromised, as everyone knew they would be (hence the widespread protests).

Yet there are many talented Australians doing great work in Open Source. Thanks perhaps to its proximity to high-tech government and defense users, Canberra has produced many of the best known names in Linux and other free software projects - including Andrew Tridgell, Nick Piggin, and many others - and remains a hotbed of hardcore kernel hackers. In Victoria there are active Open Source representative groups and many intelligent supporters. However none of this has influenced public policy as much as one might hope.

Yes, much more activism and lobbying is going to be required to eject Microjunk from the default purchasing roster, and from the IT mindset. But I am not sure things are so much better in the US - perhaps the mindless M$-centric view has simply been all-too-successfully exported. Just one more indignity ensuing from a decade of Conservative rule. The destruction wrought by the Howard Government was a major factor in my belief that the country was hopelessly regressing, and my decision to leave Australia for a more progressive and much less US-centric society. If they ever get rid of that government, and restore egalitarian policies, maybe I'll go back.

1. Slackware Linux. Still the best after all this time.
2. OpenBSD. Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out there trying to get you.
3. OpenSSH. Because you just can't use plain text telnet anymore.
4. Rsync. Just because.
5. GNU Screen. Triple your terminal productivity. Now with minty-fresh taste!
6. GNU Wget. Because you have better thing to do than watch over a download.
7. Vim.Because Emacs is for losers.
8. Nmap. Look at 'OpenBSD' above.
9. IPTables. Lock that machine down, admin boy.
10. pf. I said, lock that machine down , admin boy!

http://rzip.samba.org/ is a phenomenal compressor. It does much better than bzip2 or rar on large files and is open source.

Not only time, but also how much memory the algorithm uses, though the author did not mention how much space each algorithm uses. gzip, for instance, does not use much, but others, like rzip (http://rzip.samba.org/) uses alot. rzip may use up to 900MB during compression.

I did a test with compressing a 4GB tar archive with rzip, wich result in a compressed file of 2.1 GB. gzip at max compression gave about 2.7 GB.

So one should choose an algorithm based upon need, and of course, availability of source code. Using a propetiary, closed source compression algorithm with no open source alternative implementation is begging for trouble down the road,

how does it perform against the rest?

http://rzip.samba.org/

Andrew Bartlett from the Samba team is a proponent of such integration, taking place in Samba 4. See his paper on this.

Andrew Bartlett from the Samba team is a proponent of such integration, taking place in Samba 4. See his paper on this.

Andrew Bartlett from the Samba team is a proponent of such integration, taking place in Samba 4. See his paper on this.