New Features In Samba 2.2 And 3.0

chromatic writes "Dustin Puryear has written a nice article summarizing the new and upcoming features of Samba. He's included a nice overview of what will be available when version 3.0 escapes. Let's hear it for interoperability!"

Comments

Interoperability

[Xner]

Let's hear it for being only one step behind Microsoft! Yay!

This is one of the most commonly heard objections to interoperability software of any kind. It is usually formulated in terms of the specification being a "moving target" and that "MS can break it any time they want".
This is rubbish.

What gives Microsoft leverage over the desktop market is their present installed population. They can't go around breaking compatibility with existing products, as they cannot expect everyone to upgrade everything immidiately. The CIFS specification itself might be a "moving target", but the actual implementations in the field that it needs to be able to interoperate with are not.

As amazing as it sounds, vendor lock-in works both ways.

Re:Interoperability

[Atzanteol]

While MS may maintain backwards compatibility, it only goes so far. Try using Win98 on a Win2k network. Not gonna work.

And remember: The spec is not only changing, it is also *hidden from sight*! The SAMBA team does *not* have access to it at all. I don't know about you, but packet sniffing for a few hours just to figure out how a simple login works doesn't sound like an easy task to me.

There are many reasons why SAMBA should fail, the fact that it is kept as close to the current CIFS implementation (as dictated by MS) as it is, is nothing short of amazing.

Re:So true

[dead_penguin]

Microsoft has no reason to open *anything* up. They're big enough that in most situations they can do whatever they want without worrying about interoperability with any third party.

This (unfortunately) makes sense from a business perspective; they're much larger than the "critical mass" needed for them to set their own standards. Any extensive form of interoperability would make it much easier for people to install a mixed network instead of moving to all-Microsoft, or even moving away from MS technologies for certain machines.

This doesn't imply a monopoly situation, but rather it's their way of trying to force us to build homogenous networks instead of making it easier to sneak in a few other machines.