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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."
Okay, so how long until Samba is able to use the rsync protocol for file updates? That depends on what Microsoft decide to do I guess.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Hear that "whirr"? That's Stallman spinning in his grave, and he's not even dead yet!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Yes I do, but I'm not telling :-). Read the Samba source code :-).
Jeremy.
Hmmm, maybe he discovered the "SMB-die" attack.
we might have something better than html to post in as well.
we can only hope!
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
"Certainly (the Samba team) knows a lot more about the Microsoft protocol than the people who Microsoft sends to the (annual) CIFS conferences. The people they've sent along haven't had a clue, but I don't know if they were just people who happened to be walking up the corridor when the manager decided he needed someone to go along."
Good to know that at least somebody understands it...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
'In 50 years' time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba'
Oh, I don't know 'bout that... it's been at least a few centuries since Waltz was invented and I know a few folks who still cut the rug in 3/4 time! *rimshot*
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
There's already standardisation efforts underway to double the length of the time variables, so I don't think there's any huge issue. We should be finished within 30 years I would think.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"for rsync suppose to go to the space station?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But in most *nixes, especially of the open source variety, all one would have to do essentially is change the variables a bit and recompile. Granted, it's somewhat more complicated an effort than just that, but you get the idea. This should be a much simpler problem to fix than the y2k bug that never really was a problem.
I suppose my point is that if we were able to survive the y2k bug without much of a real problem (sure some things were broken, but compared to what we were told was going to happen, it was really smooth), we ought to be able to do the same with *nix, only much easier.
Given the turn around time of (most) Open source projects, don't you think 30 years is cutting it a bit close?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
How long until someone patents it as a device for fixing Windows security problems?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
What about Linda Lovelace, Kevin Smith, and Tux?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'd just like to say a REALLY big thank you for the time and effort you've spent working on Samba. It has been a huge benefit to me both personally and professionally, and I am taking this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude.
:)
Andrew, thanks for envisioning this project, and getting up all started. Thanks also to your wife for putting up with it, I'm not sure mine would have
The developer list is growing, and I've never even read messages from some from some of you, but it's worth taking the time to personally express thanks as individually as this forumn allows.
Jeremy Allison
Andrew Tridgell
John Terpstra
Chris Hertel
John Blair
Gerald Carter
Michael Warfield
Brian Roberson
Jean Francois Micouleau
Simo Sorce
Andrew Bartlett
Motonobu Takahashi
Jelmer Vernooij
Richard Sharpe
Eckart Meyer
Herb Lewis
Dan Shearer
David Fenwick
Paul Blackman
Volker Lendecke
Alexandre Oliva
Tim Potter
Matt Chapman
David Bannon
Steve French
Jim McDonough
*Luke Leighton
*Elrond
*Sander Striker
Thank You. You have done a great service for us all, and we are very much in your debt.
Kevin Anderson
UNIX doomsday, this only applies to 32-bit integers if you recompile your code with time as a 64-bit integer (like on 64-bit processors) then the 32 bit integer which represents time as seconds since circa 1970, will last for 70 ish years, however a 64 bit integer can store 2^32 times more numbers, meaning it will last for 70 * (2^32) years. So as long as all UNIX machines are on 64 bit processors by 2038, doomsday will be avoided until the year 300647712690. In other words approx. 280 billion years. Given that we estimate that the universe is approaching its mid life crisis, 64 bits should keep time for 9.3 universe life times. I have a feeling my math may be a bit off can someone double check this for me. I do know that 64 bit UNIX time will last for a the forseeable future.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Samba isn't developed my Microsoft; SMB is. And the problems SMB solves are fading even now; in 50 years there's no way that SMB will be useful. Microsoft will have moved on to something else.
And, of course, rsync isn't part of the rlogin/rsh/rwhatever toolset. It's completely independant.
The reason that rsync might still be used is that it implements a really powerful algorithm to do its job, which is being adopted in many cutting-edge projects. I don't know if those cutting-edge projects will have relatives which are still in use in 50 years, but they have more of a chance than Samba.
-Billy
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!
This totally ignores a more urgent problem than Y2K. I like to call it the "Y10K" problem. Since no one is preparing for it, when the year 9999 rolls around, we are going to have major problems. You see, they only updated most date fields with 4 digits, not nearly enough just a few millenia from now. And I dare you to suggest "they certainly won't be using the same computers they're using now!". That's what they said last time. Worse, all the copies of COBOL for Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to COBOL will have long since rotted.
If I were you, I'd start stocking up on canned food, and non-electronic forms of currency like rolls of toilet paper.
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).
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I have never heard of rsync, but I have a samba PDC in my basement. I'm not any hotrod Linux hacker or anything. My wife asked me how come she didnt see the same favorites on both computers?
;)
I made it so.
I'm a good husband.
Besides, these things are not just toys right? It was damn easy. Buying as much as an NT server still costs no less than $500 on ebay. samba cost about 5 minutes in FTP to get the latest for RedHat. On my K6-233 Asus tx97x its flawless. Flawless i say.
Ramble on.
Everytime I login I feel a little geekdom. Everytime my wife *doesen't* complain about the computer I feel like THE MAN. You see in my house I am Bill Gates. If windows breaks, I get the blame. If Linux is too confusing, I get the blame. So what we have here is the best of both worlds. BTW, i used to get pissed at the IT department for taking so long to launch new OSes. Now I am about to take XP off my computer because its loosing faxes and the printer dont work on it, etc... Its affecting my love life
Wrong, several UNIX variants had (or have) Y2K issues. For some systems it was just user level programs that had problems, for some it was much more serious requiring updates to the system libraries or kernel.
back in 1998 I was working for a HP VAR. We had several customers who could not upgrade their systems from HP-UX 9. Unfortunately HP's Y2K "solution" for HP-UX 9 was upgrading to HPUX 10 or 11. Most of these users were planning on setting the system clocks back 32 years.
There were a number of vile hacks put into place to get us past Y2K such as pivot dates and setting system clocks back. Hopefully these hacks won't come back to haunt us in a few years.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
> 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.
> Think so? [...]
Oh, and I forgot to add, Samba rocks, rsync rocks, and Andrew Tridgell rocks. I don't mean at all to take away from the contributions of an amazing individual in the open source movement.
"We observe the interaction between Windows boxes on the network, watch the packets (of data) going past, and then try sending that packet ourselves to see what happens. Sometimes we get a slap in the face, most times we get a coffee," he says.
It took me a second read to realize that asking for the "wrong thing" from your waitress might get you that proverbial slap in the face!
It's not that the processor can't count above 32-bits. There are 64-bit (or even higher) long long integers, and Java longs are also 64-bits. The difference is that for 64-bits on a 32-bit computer, the processor actually has to do the addition in two steps, once for each 32-bit dword. Unix programmers knew rightly that this is a little less efficient than straight 32-bit numbers, in addition to the fact that 64-bits takes twice as much memory. So they decided to go the efficient route, instead of the correct route.
There is nothing about 32-bit processors that prevents 64-bit datatypes from being emulated. Many Unixes are already migrating; the new time_t structures really are 64-bit. Java time, and I'm sure there's lots of other examples, is 64-bit as well.
- file ownership
- permissions
- symlinks
- special files (devices, etc)
- hard links
Great bit of software. Perhaps not as technically excellent as Samba, which is more complex, but very useful.Is that with all that tremendous increase in power comes equally large increases in volume of data. When getting the weather report means downloading data every second or so from a few million collection devices around the world so that your GPS watch can run a global weather simulation to tell you what weather will be like throughout the day within a 1 mile radius, then yes, rsync (or its distant children) will still be quite useful!!
Not to mention fully volumetric video feeds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, fifty years is a damn long time, so who knows.
:-) Check out his thesis at http://samba.org/~tridge.
That said, historically raw computing power has increased more rapidly than network bandwidth. Rsync is essentially about using compute power to save bandwidth, using hashes and checksums to avoid transferring unnecessary bytes. So the cost/benefit will likely still hold. The network may be faster, but the files will be bigger and the CPU will be faster still.
That said, rsync as a command-line utility will almost surely be gone, but the ideas in rsync may well migrate directly into the application layer or even the network stack. At least, it's more likely to be around than samba, which is a fantastic yet special purpose tool for a specialized problem (Windows compatible file-sharing).
Besides, tridge got his CompSci Ph.D. for his rsync work, so nobody should be surprised he's proud of it.
Matt
I agree - Y10K is the next big problem. In 7991 years and 2 months all the four digit dates will read 0000. I set up a website a while ago to solve this problem: www.parseerror.com/y10k/
This doesn't mention that he's also the person who first did a lot of the tivo hacks that are out there. How can one person do so many good things?
Sig is taking a break!
But actually the true doomsday is not until about 2100, because this is only for *signed* 32-bit integers. If you assumme unsigned then you get twice as long from 1970 before it overflows. You can also do "sliding window" hacks like those proposed for Y2K that will allow code that relies on negative values to work as long as the negative value is not too big.
Another reason that this is not a problem is that the 1-second resolution is increasingly becoming a problem and I expect virtually all uses of time in Unix to be replaced before then with some higher-resolution thing. Hopefully when this is done they will add enough extra bits so there is no overflow problem for many millenia. Probably 64 bits where 65536 is one second would be a good replacement. 64-bit IEEE floating point might also be good, it would allow short time intervals to be accurate to less than Plank time and allow Universe-age time intervals to be represented with a fraction of a second of accuracy, though the fact that addition is not communative might make people not want to use this.
Does anyone have empirical evaluations of deltas (including, but not necessarily limited to, rproxy) on today's workloads?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Slow down turbo.
:-)
Fifty years ago people thought that we all would be flying around in personal airplanes by now.
It's not usually valid to stretch a trend out beyond a decade. Unlike the last 20 years of computing, we are running into the fundamental limits of physics: the size of the atom and the speed of light. Not saying that we won't come up with something clever.
A speech...
until the year 300647712690. In other words approx. 280 billion years
:-D
:-D
Congratulations, you have just been selected for the ultimate geek award!
Hint: people that don't know about 1024 would have probably said either 300 billion years or 301 billion years.
I'll treat this message as if it's not a troll.
If you're dealing with a free Unix (Linux, BSD etc), the most 'standard' way for mounting network partitions is using NFS (the Network Filesystem.)
Several companies will sell you NFS utilities for Windows. nfsAxe is by the people who make WinaXe, a Win32 X server. A quick search doesn't turn up a standard Windows open-source solution for this.
SMB has been rebranded by Microsoft as CIFS, the Common Internet File System. Microsoft have all the official docs, but of course samba.org have more information about it than they do.
Samba is supported by all Windows machines. It doesn't even work too badly for sharing filesystems between unices (I have a public SMB share on a FreeBSD file server machine mounted on my Linux gateway: you wouldn't know it wasn't a local FS.) The permissions model isn't perfect, of course, but for a shared FS, it works good.
Your question asked "is there a better way." Well, without getting into what's wrong with Samba, it's hard to answer. If you want Windows interoperability (and it's hard to find a situation where it's not a plus), you can't go wrong with Samba. It's a very mature, stable, complete solution.
How about that this story got a WHOLE PAGE in the Australian Financial Review (and the picture of tridge was half the page).
This isn't a tech piece on Linux Orbit.
this is a mostly technically literate puff piece on linux in the newspaper that the suits of a modern nation read (roughly equivalent to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times).
thats what's newsworthy about it.
Plus Tridge lives in Canberra so he's all right unlike the rest of you bastards who pick on us (sorry, local grievances there).
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
My troll was much more obvious than you're troll!
Oh wait, your not trolling...
(Psst... I know your trolling. I love you're method. Now you write back, but don't let everybody else know...)
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
It's not lame! I got four responses... I thought it was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original.
PS, Try going to FAO Schwartz sometime (if you haven't) to see some of the most amazing Barbies. They have Irish Princess Barbie, Asian Goddess Barbie, Marilyn and James Dean Barbie, to name just a few of the FAO Schwartz exclusive collection of Barbies. (Seriously, It's an amazing toy store)
TTFN (Ta-Ta-For-Now)
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
To begin with, tridge is a great guy--having the pleasure of working with him recently--and I'm glad to see some press about him because it's well deserved.
The SMB is a standard protocol (originally designed and created by IBM). SMB is merely a pipe and messaging mechanism (sort of like IPC for networks). CIFS is an RPC mechanism that sits on top of SMB. The SNIA workgroup has published a standard for CIFS that Microsoft has contributed to.
Unfortunately, one of the big problems is that if the Windows implementation is broken, everyone else has to be too. Furthermore, Windows is always adding new calls to CIFS that of course are undocumented.
Samba is not an emulator. It is as much of a CIFS server as a Windows machine is.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
So, you're either a troll, or a...
... Which is still a troll
You shouldn't have had to asked if I was troll in the first place. I made it about as blatently fucking obvious the first time. You sir, need to develop some convictions.
I bet when you were in high school or college (if you're not still in school) you didn't clue in that a lack of eye contact really meant she didn't want to dance with you. She's not shy, she's trying to ignore you in as polite a way as she can.
I can understand one wanting to hedge thier bets, but this is silly. I was obviously troll and NOT an 11 year old girl, but I said nothing, knowing you were playing it safe (despite blatent clues)
This time, you have no other option, but to conclude that I'm a very blatent troll.
So, you're either a troll, or a
If you had any convictions, you wouldn't have made it to the ", or a", even if the other option boils down to being a troll. It's superfluous and just plain silly!
Earth and Justice to You, Fucko!
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
It's kind of amusing to use high-class trolling techniques, such as rhetorical statements and sarcasm, on someone whose ability to comprehend is as limited as yours. My original post was not "playing it safe" - I knew you weren't an 11-year old girl. That's the "rhetorical" bit, when you grow up and become a real troll, you might want to look into that.
Anyway, I can't help a sneaking suspicion that you really are impressed by FAO Schwarz, in which case you're emotionally an 11-year old girl, if not physically. So I guess my message worked on multiple levels. I'm even more of a genius than I originally thought I was! M4d propz to me!
If you had any convictions, you wouldn't have made it to the ", or a", even if the other option boils down to being a troll. It's superfluous and just plain silly!
Kind of like your first message? I dunno, I thought mine was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original. If both conclusions lead to the same thing, what does that tell you? Wouldn't that be sort of a clue? Perhaps a little too subtle...
Anyhow, I can only assume that with your stratospheric user ID, you're still learning the ropes. I look forward to the day when you join the ranks of the great trolls of /. I'm sure it'll be a few years yet, but probably by the time the UIDs reach the millions, you'll do it. I have complete faith in you. In the meantime, just try a bit harder, willya?
Oh, and try not to break character so easily, too. It's always depressing to see that in a young troll...
Instead of spreading you're trademark joylessness.
I'll be looking forward to your meaningless lack of insight.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Do you usually feed the trolls until they puke? This isn't fun anymore. I don't like it, so I give up.
You're too clever and persistant for me, especially with your German poetry, which I had to translate with Babelfish.
I tired of trying to be evil. You sir/madame are truly wise as a snake and as harmless as a dove.
I was going to go into some pointless rant on how truely insightful trolls have a cause, but I don't care anymore. I just want to go back to work.
Thanks for sucking the joy out of trolling for me...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce