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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); }
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