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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.
for rsync suppose to go to the space station?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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
Indeed. An often-times overlooked benefit of open-source is the exposure a product can attain simply by virtue of being open. A closed source product team has to make an investment in a quality assurance group, which usually works 9 - 5. An open source project (assuming it is highly visible) is capable of leveraging a global supply of quality assurance engineers to test their product 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The whole world is essentially their beta testers.
While the Samba folks have done us Linux folk a tremendous favor (reverse engineering *any* protocol is difficult) in encapsulating all of the SMB details via Samba, they have also performed a huge service to MicroSoft and the rest of the closed-source world by hammering on the various platforms that come out of Redmond. As the article points out, every new version (or patch release) is put through it's paces against Samba. Although their primary goal is to ensure compatibility, the secondary effect is extremely valuable to non-Samba users: bugs in server software from a closed source vendor are exposed (and hopefully fixed).
The difficulty is that the rest of the world (and probably MicroSoft in particular), either doesn't see, or see's but turns a cold shoulder none-the-less to the open source community.
Thank you Andrew for your work and the work of your team.
Do it for da shorties
> 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.
- 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
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!
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.'