Slashdot Mirror
Samba Turns 10
abartlet writes: "Samba is celebrating its 10th birthday - initally released as Andrew Tridgell's humble 'Server 0.5' 10 long years ago. Tridge has made some notes on the past 10 years. And Samba is still going strong, becoming a cornerstone of the Linux community. Samba 3.0 is on its way and promises many new features, including for the first time support as a server in an Active Directory domain!
But the biggest thanks goes to all those who have contributed code, bugs, testing, docs and feedback in general. We could not have come the last 10 years without you!
-- Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team."
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
Samba is a great piece of softare, don't get me wrong... but you're still emulating that suck ass non-routable smb protocol. Why not use something worth your time? I'm sure some of you will say NetWare is dead, or NetWare sucks, but by saying that you are admitting you know nothing about NetWare and Novell's current product line.
Give it a shot. You'll learn something, and find out it's a much better product than SMB and any M$ attempt at an NOS.
The court was tired of recounts, and demonstrated how to take care of it.
No bashing here , but Samba validates Microsoft.
Samba is awesome stuff a little harry for a late night conversion on a 300 gig W2K server at times but good stuff.
Samba makes MS look that much better and more important, funny about every couple months you hear about MS planning to do something on their end to undo the work of Samba team, seems to me like a good bed fellow for Microsoft.
Good Bad Ugly or None of the above , none of it matters when talking MS, fact is its here for the long haul, we have to connect to it, Ostritch networking dosent work in the real work (i.e. Its ms were just no going to connect and well stick our heads in the sand and act like it dosent exist) MS has been the bearer or butcher, whatever you think of many standards, Samba VALIDATES a few of those MS altered standards.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Welcome to SlashDot.
Fsck windows!
Now go away.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.