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.

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 !

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.

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

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: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)..

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: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....