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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."
Mad, mad props to these guys for 10 years of work on a protocol that you know Microsoft has worked long and hard to obfuscate through a lack of literature and, to some extent, probably in the arrangement of information in each payload.
I also get the same feeling of awe when I see emulators for proprietary game systems released a very short time after the hardware is. For example, I spent some time writing a little game for the PlayStation to get my hands dirty, which I couldn't have done without the talents of the people who take the time to disassemble the ROMs, write the docs, produce the tools, and analyze the source code.
If there were some way I could contribute monetarily to the Samba project or even some of my time (I have done some rev-eng stuff myself, mostly on undocumented Palm libraries), I would gladly do it. These guys deserve major kudos.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I personnally use !SmbServer under RiscOS in order to efficiently share some files and printers with Linux and Windows machines.
I just find it amazing and it IMHO has become a true protocol, much beyond its original Linux/Windows filesharing scope.
Thanks !
Trolling using another account since 2005.
...For best product enabling some semblance of competition in an office workplace environment, and for all their efforts going up against a very well funded vendor lock-in conspiracy. A great example of real software technology competition on it's own merits w/o the heavy reliance on marketing and legal manouvering.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Unfortunately, the SAMBA team has a much bigger challenge on the horizon.
Microsoft is just biding thier time and waiting for the ultimate outcome of the Napster and other laws that forbid fair use, reverse engineering, etc.
My personal prediction for 2002-2003 year is that SAMBA will end up in the fryin pan with a letter from Microsoft's cronies/lawyers telling them they are in violation of and that they must cease operations immediately.
Same goes for a lot of other open source projects.
I think the Open Source community should preempt the money establishment and prepare for the day when projects and servers can distribute free software without being so centralized as they are today. (i.e. SourceForge).
I won't get into what I think the rammifications are should SourceForge ever becomes seriously compromised. (i.e. a new project Opens up and voila', the source code to Windows 2000 is downloadable....)
The past year has been the worst year of patents, MULA, EULA, RIAA and DMCA crap I have ever seen.
More shananigans no doubt will be the rule of thumb for 2003, but only this time, there won't be so much confusion, as recent ignorant courts have made some very very dangerous precedents.
Microsoft is just waiting for enough of them to accumulate before they hit the Open Source community with 2 Billion dollars funding a horde of lawyers that will forever do away with critical key software the OpenSource community relies on. (i.e. SAMBA, Linux Kernel, X-Windows, etc.)
It very well maybe that Europe will see the rebirth of Open Source as such crap doesn't go over very easily in Europe. (i.e. the ludicrous idea of software patents.)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I couldn't agree more, however NetWare 6 doesn't require a Novell Client to be installed any more. So that argument goes away. My gripe is with the Novell kernel. It kinda sucks compared to Linux and NT. There are still way to many times a process abends and it locks the console.
However, I think that Linux kinda blows for a file and print server in a med-large environment. Linux needs "access control list" built in to a typical Red Hat or other major distro. The idea of only having ONE owner, group or "other", for file permissions kinda sucks for most businesses. It would be nice if Linux also supported inherited rights mask, like NetWare also.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I think Samba exists not for the validation of Microsoft but for the encouragement of interaction among heterogeneous systems.
Here are a couple of points to consider:
I think overriding effect of Samba and other free software projects that implement proprietary protocols is to make operating sytems that incorporate these implementations (originally GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but now also several other UNIX variants) more attractive as newcomers to many previously entirely DEC or Microsoft shops, since they can interoperate seamlessly with legacy equipment. I would rather implement GNU/Linux with Samba in my datacenter than some proprietary OS that doesn't use Samba because I know Samba will be perpetually maintained and will always interoperate with any particular legacy system I am forced to use.
Having worked for a major life sciences company in a biochemistry research facility, I know the need for interoperability with legacy systems. For example, we had a number of instruments called BetaRams which we the biochemistry IT team had to support because they would be expensive to replace, yet the company that manufactured these no longer existed. The only software available for these systems was only certified to work on particular versions of IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. We had to be able to allow the software to write data to network drives, and all we could run was LAN Manager or Novell. We needed to store the data on fault-tolerant, near-perfect-availability systems. So, we used VMS with PathWorks (SMB) - this decision was made long before Samba.
Actually, for a home network with a broadband Internet pipe, I would probably use NetBEUI for the SMB services, precisely because it is non-routable. It works fine on small nets, and the non-routability makes it much harder for unauthorized external users (i.e. crackers) to mount shares.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Since the initial announcement on USENET was 1992-01-10 see here. And todays date is 2002-01-08. So isn't it more right to say that Samba's 10th birthday 2002-01-10? Or am I missing something?
Indeed, thanks to the design of NetBIOS and the MSRPC protocols for NT domains, it is quite easy to be a very disruptive influence on a network. And thanks to bugs in the NT implementation, misconfiguring Samba can actually take down NT machines! (Yes, that's a denial-of-service security hole. No, Microsoft doesn't care.) Of course, misconfiguring NT machines can take down NT machines as well - but NT's configuration isn't even close to as easy / flexible as Samba's....
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I have said this many times before and many people agree with me on this. All Samba (and Linux) needs is a simple way of graphically browsing and right-clicking, then choosing a menu option of share. It also needs to become more incorporated into the operating system to allow one single listing of user accounts, instead of one list for Samba, one list for the OS.
This will do wonders for opening up Linux to places that it currently is unable to get into. I am not saying that those other lists need to go away, because there are plenty of times when having those additional, seperate, user lists can be beneficial to security.
Will having a powerful feature like that seriously hinder the stability and security of Linux? I personally believe that that wouldn't be an issue, if implemented properly.
Until that day, unfortunately, Linux will remain a backroom OS only usable by those that enjoy learning and battling with dificult to follow configuration files. I happen to enjoy that, but I cannot count the number of times that a Samba config gave me minor issues with a single config line.
The news that I really want to hear is someone proclaiming that they have built a Linux distro that allows you to easily setup the system with one single user listing and the ability to configure network shares very similiar to how you can do so under Windows.
I know, it is a blasphemous thing to say. However, it is the truth. It will help Linux grow in market share, usability and seriously help Linux gain more ground over Windows.
If I had the time, I would work on it myself. I just don't have the time and energy for such an ambitous project. Please,take this idea and run with it.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Calling the above post flamebait is like calling someone that watched a football game a murderer.
It is a simple, inteligent response that has excellent merit.
What kind of moderator are you anyway?