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

The begining

[ImaLamer]

I'm glad to see the links to the USENET post along side the story.

Story submitters: Try to do this every time. It's provides context, and you know we all want just click and not hunt it down.

Samba is cool,

[Make]

.. and the team really does great work. But, the SMB protocol is a moving target, we had to see that several times in the past. The Samba team has always managed to readapt to new protocol versions. Everyone who has worked with Windows' network Neighborhood knows that SMB is also a really really broken protocol which only works with much patience.
Wouldn't it be just better to invent a very new protocol, and provide clean clients for all major operating systems (Linux, BSD, windows 9x/NT, etc.). For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)
I'm a bit thinking about efforts like Coda which is in the Linux kernel for years now, and there also exists a Windows client. Last time I checked there was no NT client which makes Coda practically useless at this stage.
But I think a clean, well designed, secure and stable protocol would be a benefit for big company's networks and for home networks. I work as developer, but I often help our admins. It's a network of w2k, NT4, Linux and FreeBSD machines (about 60 computers). The Windows machines always suck... in many cases because SMB doesn't work as it should.

Re:Samba is cool,

[Make]

Many people don't know it, but Windows is in fact modular ;)

The SMB protocol in Windows is just ONE driver.. you can integrate others as well, you "only" need to have deep knowledge of the internals of Windows (one thing I don't have). My point is, you don't need M$' cooperation for that. I guess if someone who really knows Windows writes a driver, it can be made work better than any reverse engineered SMB server emulation.

One problem with missing M$' cooperation is that it won't be shipped with Windows. Many admins don't even install service packs regularly - why should they be more motivated to install 3rd party drivers.. on all clients! It's just not automatically in there when Windows is freshly installed. Seems funny that this is a real problem, but mustn't be underestimated.

Re:Samba is cool,

[AnalogBoy]

In some organizations open source is considered taboo in some applications. Namely, those applications where there is a "Big name", albiet closed-source alternative with professional support, documented in an SLA or support agreement. Samba is not a product of RedHat, nor of HP. It is bundled software.

And 3rd parties digging through code.. Im not sure I really like that idea in my environment. No thanks, but i'll stick with companies who's stock prices are well into the double-digits. This isn't an HP Shop, nor is linux allowed in our production environment. Therefore, as i elaborate on below, I'm unconcerned with the principle.

[BEGIN Diatribe]
This discussion boils down to Administration Philosophies, Open Source Zealotism and professionalism on both sides. It trancends into the metaphysical layers of the OSI Model. Financial and Political for me, Religious for most of slashdot. To my contemporaries and myself, open source software simply isnt worth the "risk". Our investors don't like it, we're past the buzzword stage, and you know, in the end, our purpose is to make money, not to stand on philosophy. The one Linux application we ran was a unmitigated disaster. While I know it doesnt speak for all OpenSource applications, it certainly puts forth the idea that when you put something into production, you want to make sure it is completely, totally, and undeniably supported for its entire lifepsan. Unix/OSS is not a way of life for me. It isn't the godhead of my existence - its not my calling. Its my job. I do my job, I take appropriate steps to ensure I'm the best I can be at what I do, and then I go home and attempt to improve myself in other ways. I like Windows. I like Unix. I accept the benefits of both. My employers like that. This is the reason i've gotten the jobs i've gotten. [Well, it obviously wasn't my charming personality]

[END diatribe]

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[Rostoff]

I've integrated numerous NetWare/NT networks. It just requires a skill set a lot of people just don't have these days. What app are you talking about? Why do you blame the NetWare for the app's misbehavior? ZenWorks, simply, kicks ASS. People mock what they don't (or won't) understand.

BDC?

[lavaforge]

First off, kudos to the samba team for developing a product that works well and raises Microsoft's ire.

Does anyone know if future versions of Samba will be able to function as a backup domain controller in an NT4 domain? That right there would be a huge boon for companies that don't want to spend MS License costs, but need failover protection.

Unfortunately, I'm still a novice programmer, and that sort of thing is well above my abilities. Oh well, maybe one day.

...same as Japan validating American cars

[fireboy1919]

Samba works faster than Microsoft networking (there are tests showing this). I'll admit, Microsoft keeps pushing the envelope - releasing new stuff that barely works, and giving great new ideas to Samba's developers.

And as far as making standards, a lot of the new ideas for a browser come from MS. Are they bad ideas? I think not. MS does a lot of things very badly, but their internet browser is top notch - it works better, and encorporates a lot of interesting features not found in other browsers. If they'd release it under Linux, I'd have no good reason to dual boot.

Re:2003 Challenges for SAMBA team

[HeUnique]

Not so fast,

Yes, the samba people do reverse engineer lots of part in SMB, AD etc, but MS knows about it, MS got even a link to Samba on their web pages, and there is even a person (forgot his name) who works at Microsoft (they call him "our man at MS")...

Microsoft actually profiting from this move - sure, they'll loosing a bit on server selling if you use Linux as a PDC, but you still need NT/2K for BDC stuff, you're also using Exchange server which needs licenses (and connected to PDC/BDC), and the biggest part - those servers service the Windows workstations - which is the big revenue to MS...

So if MS wanted to sue the SAMBA people - they would have sued them long time ago (see how fast they sued Lindows for a small thing as the name)..

Re:Samba validates Microsoft

[DThorne]

>> No bashing here , but Samba validates Microsoft.

No it doesn't! There seems to be two groups of people here - those that embrace every attempt to get Linux to work with the rest of the world, and those that see anything like that as some sort of "betrayal" to the Linux community (to be fair, you haven't worded it that strongly, but I've seen it many times here).

As an end user, and not a hacker, I cannot tell you how important it is to be able to have sharing of resources with others, regardless of their OS. It goes without saying that the majority of computing resources in the world are attached to MS-run machines. Anything that promotes access is a winner in my books. That the Samba team has accomplished this, to the degree they have, with a protocol as "crappy" as that, with MS doing everything they can to obfuscate matters, well, hats off to you people. Thank you very, very much.
Would you prefer that they dismantle Samba and wait until enough Open Source resource sharing protocols are embraced by windows users? Don't hold your breath!

Sincerely

DT

Re:Yeah right why not use Novell crap if you love

[cscx]

Not necessarily. I've loaded apache and tomcat into protected memory space and still had them f*ck up the server. Although, Netscape Enterprise server was a lot worse at crashing (all the time!) we had to use it for Groupwise integration. A lot of times it locked up so bad I had to escape into the console debugger to exit Netware (still dropped me to an oh-so-familiar DOS prompt though!) and restart the server. Not nice, as it never cleanly unmounted the FS that way. OTOH, my IIS 4 server, which ran side by side with the NetWare server on a measley P-150 while the NetWare server was a PII-550, still outperformed it and never once BSOD'd or crashed. Only time I had to reboot it was when I had to apply hotfixes. Meanwhile, it seemed like I was rebooting the NW server every other day. The moral of the story: Netware as a web server sucks!