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.

Rev-eng feats never cease to amaze me

[InterruptDescriptorT]

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.

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.

Re:Rev-eng feats never cease to amaze me

[cscx]

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.

Well, it is Microsoft's protocol... no one really has the God-given right to reverse engineer it! You're acting like you're pissed off about it, but remember, if it wasn't for MS, Samba wouldn't exist.

Re:Rev-eng feats never cease to amaze me

[afidel]

but remember, if it wasn't for MS, Samba wouldn't exist.

hehehe well MS didn't write SMB, they took it from the lanmanager standard, I believe origionally written by a number of companies including IBM. Now you are partially correct in stating that SAMBA, the project wouldn't exist without MS, because there wouldn't have been the need, all the trials and tribulations that the team went through wouldn't have existed if MS hadn't co-opted the standard and done their typical embrace and extend on it.

Not only under Linux

[mirko]

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 !

Here Here

[TRoLLaXoR]

Kudos to the programmers.

I used Samba 2 as the basis of my CS senior project. It was maervelous technology then, and it's only gotten better since.

BTW, my senior project led to the use of Linux in our labs, as SMB was the only thing they really needed and had been looking at going to a *nix. My project deomnsrated that Linux with Samaba was the platform they needed to be on.

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,

[More Trouble]

You might try looking at OpenAFS. It has many of the properties that you're wishing for above.

Re:Samba is cool,

[AnalogBoy]

NFS has its problems, but securing NFS is something that many people are working on. Sun includes support for the sec= option on their NFS mounts; NFSv4 specs include various security protocols such as TLS, Kerb, SKPM..

I don't know how fast a "Aftermarket" FS would take off in the IT market right now. Most people are locking into "static" mode - Nobody i know in TN is going to Windows XP in their enterprise, and people are just now beginning to move to Solaris 8 (Where they had systems at 2.6 previously.) I know some enterprise, especially those serious about maintaining the assured quality of their networks, are not going to install a 3rd party filesystem.. as part of the "holy trinity", a filesystem is something that most system engineers/admins, at least those I know, aren't going to take any risks on.

I stand by my opinion that a Open Systems Consortium should be in charge of ensuring interoperability of operating systems.

Just my $0.02 on Samba: *Pulls hair out*

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]

Quite established and well known, though. Recommended heavily by vendors, sun, oracle..

I'm talking things such as Coda, etc.

Personally, it was a godsend when i found out about WSFU.. eliminate samba in the environment - We're heavily reliant on cross-platform FS, heavily enough that we don't want to use an unsupported product. Services for Unix's Gateway for NFS is going to make me a happy man this year.

Re:Samba is cool,

[augustz]

This is actually a solid idea. A lot of the current possible replacements suffer a bit from being too sophisticated. In a small office enviroment having a distributed file system may not be needed. And the complexity makes it harder to write various clients that are rock solid stable. Expose mount points as shares, with some decent security and you've got 90% of the small office enviroment covered.

KISS :)

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:Samba is cool,

[2Bits]

...you "only" need to have deep knowledge of the internals of Windows (one thing I don't have).

I do. I even know the error code in hex by heart. I can even recite you all the hex codes on the blue screen (it happens so often that I can remember this, amazing!).

Re:Samba is cool,

[dublin]

For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)

While I couldn't agree more that something better is required, NFS is quite good (esp, v3 and v4).
It's also important to remember (or learn) that authentication is NOT a function of NFS - that is done elsewhere. Most people just use garden-variety NIS, which is totally insecure, but ubiquitous and interoperable. NFS can operate securely (Kerberos or whatever else you want, it's pluggable), but most people choose not to, either out of laziness or ignorance. (Although Sun hasn't made secure operation as easy as it should have, either...)

Re:Samba is cool,

[dublin]

Services for Unix's Gateway for NFS is going to make me a happy man this year.

At least until you realize what colossal Microsoft single points of failure you've introduced into your environment with SFU and/or Microsoft DFS....

(This may have changed with XP, I haven't checked, but I doubt it. It was definitely true with W2K.)

Re:Samba is cool,

[psamuels]

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.

What exactly is wrong with 3rd parties digging through code? It's not like the original programmers are all going to be still working for the vendor you buy stuff from. For that matter, the software you buy may itself have been developed elsewhere and later purchased by your vendor - effectively making your vendor a "3rd party digging through code".

If you pay a consultant enough money they should be more than happy to accept the burden of digging through someone else's code. If they turn out to be incompetent to maintain / fix that code, it's the same as if they turn out to be incompetent to do anything else you hire them for.

And what do stock prices have to do with anything? You're saying your company never does professional business with any company whose stock price isn't well into the double digits? If you think the stability of a supplier is in doubt, you don't just walk away from the deal - you make sure you have backup suppliers. Why not the same with support contracts?

This discussion boils down to Administration Philosophies, Open Source Zealotism and professionalism on both sides.

You forgot "Closed Source Zealotism" - or "zealotry", I think the word is. You've said it yourself - for some shops open source is taboo, without there necessarily being any concrete rational reasons.

Well, zealotry rarely hurts anyone other than the zealot (in a free society anyway). If a shop wishes to ignore the various advantages to using open-source solutions, hey, it's their budget.

coming from a different angle

[motherfuckin_spork]

Since I came into doing lots of "computer stuff" from the outside, intially, when I first read about samba I basically said to myself "That's what I've been looking for!".

And since then, I've networked by freakin' house - all because of samba and netatalk.

AD Support?

[alen]

Sounds good. May have to check it out as a cheap file server. I wonder how it will compare to EMC though.

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:World's Shortest Samba HOW-TO

[vsavkin]

It is smbmount, not smbclient that is Linux-only and is not part of Samba.

Golden Pizza Award

[ch-chuck]

...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.

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.

Samba and AD

[larien]

It is actually possible as it stands to get Samba to at least authenticate to an AD server (I'm guessing due to backward-compatible features making the AD DC act more like an NT4.0 DC); we're doing it here. However, there's probably a load of other AD features that aren't supported in 2.2, so best of luck on improving what is already a very good product!

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[sphealey]

Novell was great in it's day. I've watched it mature from the old DOS versions to the 5.x flavor.

That being said, integrating novell with a Windows NT network is a pain in the a$$. I currently support an application that runs on a Novell base(which in 3 weeks will be changed to a NT based network).

Kind of funny in three respects: (a) Netware was never a DOS program, although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader. Netware's distant ancestors in the family tree would be more like Wang and System/1, not Seattle DOS or its descendents. (b) that said, Novell did basically invent workable MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 networking, for which Microsoft should be eternally grateful (we all know how Bill repays debts, though) (c) it is funny how the Microsoft meme generator leads even knowledgable people to say that "Netware is not compatible", when based on history, technology, and market share over the last 20 years it is NT which is not compatible with Netware. Deliberately so, of course, as anyone who remembers the nightmare of MS-Office 97 Service Pack 2 can attest.

"Every mistake made with computers has been made three times: on mainframes, minis, and micros. Now we are building networks..."

sPh

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.

Re:BDC?

[markhb]

So you don't need Windows boxes to act as BDC's. Redundancy in essential network services is a Good Thing.

(Good Thing is a trademark of Martha Stewart Enterprises.)

...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.

2003 Challenges for SAMBA team

[hackus]

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.)

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:Yeah right why not use Novell crap if you love

[FatherOfONe]

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.

Best wishes to Samba!

[GdoL]

Samba is one of the best examples of systems integration I ever seen. They tried to bring together two opposite sides that didn't seem to be interested to be together and did a terrific job.

Samba should be at the next Carnival in Rio, guys!!

Re:Samba validates Microsoft

[infernalC]

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:

• Microsoft's LAN Manager and their later implementations of SMB were not the only commercial implementations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but DEC PathWorks is an SMB implementation still under development and distribution by Compaq on OpenVMS.
• Other proprietary file transfer protocols have been reverse-engineered and implemented in free software by other projects, including Novell and AppleTalk. Are the companies with the most popular implementations of the protocols also validated?

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.

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[markhb]

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.

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

Not for long...

[Brendan Byrd]

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...

Once Samba becomes a full-fledged server/client piece, with PDC/BDC et all, you would be able to have a full network with Linux stations and servers running Samba.

Why use Samba for Linux, if most are Linux anyway? For those couple of MS workstations/servers you still have. It would be great for migrating from MS to Linux. First, slowly replace the servers with Samba stations, then slowly replace the workstations. MS wouldn't like it if Samba was widely being used as a Windows-to-Linux migration tool.

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.

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

[psamuels]

But at least NetWare has protection. Does Linux? Does NT?

Uh, what? What sort of "protection"? The question is kind of vague.

Linux and NT (and all modern OSes) support memory protection, so one process can't access the memory of another process or of the kernel except by explicit arrangement. They also have crash protection, so an unprivileged user process can't (in theory) cause serious harm to the running of the system.

These have been considered standard features for a serious OS for fifteen years at least. The fact that Windows 95/98/Me and Mac OS 9 didn't have them only means that they should not be considered serious OSes. The fact that Netware 4 didn't have them means it was designed for a niche, not general-purpose.

Re:Ah

[psamuels]

Take down a network without even trying. Gotta love that power.

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....

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!

Now all it really needs...

[cnelzie]

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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Re:Now all it really needs...

[cnelzie]

NIS?, that works for me. Now answer the second, more important piece of my comment.

Show me a kernel incorported Samba configuration that allows shares to be created on the fly, as you can under the Windows OS.

By the way, I am unable to claim that I am a guru or true expert on everything Linux related. I have never read anything about NIS, until your insightful post.

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Re:Now all it really needs...

[cnelzie]

I have used SWAT, I have used Webmin and I have manually edited the configuration files. I have never seen a tool in KDE or GNOME that will accomplish what I am looking for. What I would love to see is a simple, right-click on the folder and then left-click on the share option in the menu.

Once this feature is added to Linux, small business people and small IT consulting services can begin to look at Linux as a viable option.

Until then, only people with time and interest in banging their heads against a wall will use Linux. Being one of those people, I know what it is like.

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Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[borzwazie]

doesn't LMHOSTS get around this?

Re:Another IE fanboy

[dinivin]

IE is not a browser. IE is not "software".
IE is a criminal tool of an anticompetitive monopoly.

Believe it or not, Troll, it is possible for IE to be all three of the above.

It also happens to be the best browser for Windows.

Dinivin

Lindows...

[Per Abrahamsen]

Trademarks are different. There, you _have_ to sue, or lose it. You can ignore copyright violations and still retain the copyright.

Opera fangrrl over here...

[MsGeek]

On my 2K box I find that I use Opera 6 more than IE. There are places I have to use IE to get to (The MCP secure site at M$ to give an example) but Opera 6 is faster, handles multiple windows better and is free as in beer if you don't mind a little ad banner in your taskbar.

On Linux I like Konqueror. It's IE the way IE should be. I suspect there are people sniffing around at Konqui's code up in Redmond now.

This reminds me...I should download Opera for MacOS PPC right away. Netscape 4.08 and its quirks are getting old, and IE 4 for Mac committed seppuku a few weeks ago...it freezes when you try to open it.

Yeah, I'm typing this from work on IE. But folks... http://www.opera.com/ . Just do it. Actually supporting these guys by buying the browser is a Very Good Thing (tm) and it's really not that expensive.

smbfs

[Satai]

One of the more interesting applications of the SMB protocol has, in my experience, been the smbfs part of FreeBSD. It's not very well known, but it's incredible easy to use - nowadays it's even part of the base system; no port needed.

One of my machines boots into both BSD and windows; the other one serves as a Samba server so that I can share media and data. Using smbfs, I was able to put a line into /etc/fstab that mounted all my SMB shares at bootup. Then I was able to share JPilot information, .vimrc's and so forth.

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[dublin]

Although few people here know it, Novell's file sharing protocol, NCP, kicks serious butt. It is probably by far the best file-sharing protocol on the planet for serious production use. (there's some interesting stuff in the works, but at present development rates, it'll be years before its as robust and fast as NCP.

The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.

Case in point: NetWare won a shootout I conducted in 1994 to pick the best file-sharing system on which to deploy an emergency oil spill response system (be in full communication with Houston from anywhere in the world within 15 minutes of hitting the ground, with no computer guys for hundreds of miles!) The data link was over an Inmarsat satellite telephone - horrible latency with the bird in geosynchronous orbit. Everything was on PCs, and file sharing was mandatory to support Microsoft Mail and I included NetWare just for political reasons, expecting it to get creamed by one of the NFSes from NetManage, FTP Software, or Sun.

Readers' Digest Version: NetWare smoked everyone so bad, I thought it must just be that all PC NFSs were bad - but the same thing happened with a Unix box over such a high latency link. I dug into it, talking with some of the Novel protocol jocks, and we identified several things that made it even faster, which they added in the next release. NetWare flat flew, NFS was unusable. I was sold on the superiority of NCP, and I think that's still true today.

Good engineering still wins. As a longtime Unix bigot, I even developed a respect for NetWare, and how little server resources it needed to support a serious number of clients. NetWare is arguably not a real OS, but there's nothing faster for serving up files and printing, and sometimes, that's all the job is. (Sadly, I haven't worked with NetWare in several years. Its only problem back then was that it was an order of magnitude more difficult to manage than it had any right to be. Much like Linux in that regard...)

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[dublin]

although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader

A friend of mine used to say, "DOS isn't really an operating system, but it's a damn fine program loader!" Pretty accurate, really.

(Program loaders were common back in the early minicomputer days before many computers had the resources to afford luxuries like an OS.)

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[sphealey]

The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.

I agree, and you haven't even mentioned NDS. But my question is, why doesn't Novell do something with that technology? It has been clear for five years that Microsoft was winning the FUD => mindshare => marketshare game. NT dominated networks had the inevitibility of an avalanche going downhill.

Why didn't Novell recognize Microsoft's Maoist strategy by 1990 (enemy advances, we retreat...)? Many of us in the networking world did. Why didn't (and doesn't) Novell try to find some way to counterattack other than a head-on assult? Why not seriously open source some NDS code? Why not a real Netware client for Linux? Why not try to find some ground, any ground, to fight where Microsoft doesn't hold the heights? Why didn't Novell buy Netscape in 1995 when they had the cash (although given what they did to WordPerfect and SoftSolutions, maybe not!)?

At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".

sPh

Re:Dork Moderators

[sphealey]

This isn't off topic you damn dorks, Slashdot RARELY speaks of NetWare, you guys are consumed by unix and M$. God forbid something else get thrown into the mix.

Too true. And really odd also. There are many similiarities in the way Linux and Netware are handled in large organizations, particularly in difference in perceptions between the CxO level and the trenches level. Both are good technologies under attack from the Microsoft FUD/Marketing machine. Both have much to learn from each other.

Yes, Novell had (and has) pricing and maketing problems - probably fatal. And yes, if your only experience with Netware is a 3.11 network set up by someone whose brother once took the Intro class, it can be horrendeous (sound familar? Linux set up by someone who has never used Unix before?).

But the reflexive hatred to things Netware seen on Slasdot is pretty counterproductive.

sPh

Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu

[dublin]

At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".

I'm afraid so, even Eric Schmidt couldn't turn the place around - he recently left as CEO of Netscape to be CEO of Google. For those that don't know, Eric is the brilliant former CTO of Sun who was the internal champion behind Java and many other cool things we now enjoy...