Interview with Andrew Tridgell

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "See here for a *great* interview with tridge. My favourite quote: 'In 50 years' time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another,' Tridgell says. Cheers, Jeremy."

Comments

Re:i want this sequence

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Yes I do, but I'm not telling :-). Read the Samba source code :-).

Jeremy.

Samba will be remembered as the Microsoft D-Day

[tucay]

Samba was our beach head that allowed us to get a footing on Microsoft so we could execute missions in their territory.

The best thing is that our Samaba soldiers will still live on to write other great software to help us rid our lives of Microsoft software.

Thanks samba team even though I rarely use your Samba software anymore. I use rsync all the time on my Gentoo systems!

Not just Microsoft...

[Jacco de Leeuw]

Years ago I stumbled into a bug in OS/2 Warp 4. I got the SMB networking process to crash after a sequence of smbclient commands.

So I downloaded a bug report form from the IBM website, filled in all details and sent it off. After a while I got a response. I could not make heads or tails of it. It was in some kind of IBM speak. (IBM speak really exists. Do they still call a harddisk a "hard file"? :-)

So I forwarded the message to Timothy Sipples, who had been very active on Usenet and had just started working for IBM. He translated it for me: I was not a big account customer so they would not accept the bug report. Sigh...

Soon after that, Linux became my main OS.

(I actually made a patch for smbclient so that it would not kill OS/2, but I never forwarded it to the Samba people).

In 50 years? Think so?

[image]

> In 50 years time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another

Think so? The Univac was state of the art in 1952. Considering that the progress of technology is accelerating over time (check out The History of Computing Timeline), do you really think that the ideas behind rsync are going to be relevant? Network throughput is already getting massive. If we could fast-forward to 2052, I imagine we would barely recognize the technologies in use.

Do you think that Turing could have even fathomed performing a billion operations a second and having a almost a terrabyte of storage available and (almost) accessible anywhere on the planet at megabit data transfer rates? In our homes? For an inflation adjusted price of under $100? You have to be kidding me -- it would have blown his mind.

In 2052 CPU power will be effectively unlimited (imagine doing a billion billion operations per second), storage constraints meaningless, and, if networking trends continue and/or quantum plays out (as it may), effectively instantaneous access to that data.

Think we'll still be diff-ing data to squeeze the most out of the net? In 2052 that is the last thing we'll be bothering with.

All this only hold true of course if we assume that technology will improve as fast as it historically has and that we don't hit a cataclysmic end to human progress in general (plague, nuclear armageddon, etc). But if the last 50 years have been any indication, what we will see in 2052 will bare little resemblance to what we have in 2002.

Whither rproxy?

[Frisky070802]

The article mentioned how great rsync is for HTTP traffic, and left it at that. I've seen rproxy in the rsync source tree, but I wonder how active it is these days, and whether it has a chance for wide adoption. What good is cutting the transfer down by 90% if no one uses it? Also, there's a somewhat dated study of delta-encoding (and rsync/rproxy is in this genre) that raises the issue of how frequently the same data is retrieved repeatedly.

Does anyone have empirical evaluations of deltas (including, but not necessarily limited to, rproxy) on today's workloads?