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."

Comments

World's Shortest Samba HOW-TO

[hopeless case]

Back in July, I wrote a 3 paragraph SAMBA HOW-TO over on www.rootprompt.org here, shortly after being appalled at the quality of yet another article supposed to show you how to get started with SAMBA.

By the end of it, you can actually do something (gasp!) useful in some circumstances.

Here's the text

Samba how-to articles start off with how to write a configuration file so that your linux box can export a disk or print share that could be read by a windows client on the same network. I think this is a big mistake. The first thing you should show someone is the simplest possible command that acutaly makes something interesting happen. The time to explain the smb.conf file is when the next most interesting, complex experiment requires it, not before. There are a few very interesting and useful commands you can type that don't require that smb.conf even exists, let alone that the smbd and nmbd deamons are running.

Without further adieu, here is the simplest command:

smbclient -L server1 -U user%pass

If you type this command into a bash prompt on a linux box, it will attempt to contact the machine with netbios name 'server1' on your network and get a list of all the disk and print shares it is exporting to the windows network neighborhood. It will do so using the username 'user' and password 'pass'. If you, as I do, run linux on your office workstation on a lan with a bunch of machines running windows, this is the first thing you would want to do.

The next most interesting command looks like this:

smbclient //server1/share1 -U user%pass

This will attempt to connect you to the remote disk or print share 'share1' on the machine with netbios name 'server1'. If successful, you will be sitting at a command prompt at which you can use commands like cd, ls, get, and put, mkdir, rmdir, rm, ..., provided, of course, the username and password you used allow you such access to the remote share. If '//server/share1' is a print share, the command 'print file1' will send the local file 'file1' to the printer. If the printer is a postscript printer, you are in luck as most linux software prints to postscript files by default. If it is an ink jet printer, then you will need to use ghostscript to convert the postscript file to a file of the printer's format first, then send that file with smbclient.

Now go have fun, y'all

Re:Rev-eng feats never cease to amaze me

[Jodrell]

If there were some way I could contribute monetarily to the Samba project

It's a well known fact that Andrew Tridgell, Samba's creator, accepts Pizza if you feel the urge to be generous. More details in the FAQ:

Andrew doesn't askfor payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.

Method 1: Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do, which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza one night, courtesy of someone in the US

Method 2: Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany did this.

Method 3: Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has from Germany :-)

Method 4: Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture.

Cornerstone?

[Xunker]

"...becoming a cornerstone of the Linux community."

This counts as sort of amusing as Samba was originally written for Trigells' DEC system, and I doubt he even expected to ever get off his DEC, let along be ported to a dozen other systems and become one of the highest profile Free Software projects in use.