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New Features In Samba 2.2 And 3.0

Posted by timothy on from the now-with-more-rhythm dept.

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!"

2 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Windows Interoperability by MrWa · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What about the anti-trust decision? How did that affect the Samba team: will they have better access to interoperability specifications? What about security protocols and API - can they get these? Do they need them?

    As more and more of Microsoft's efforts start going towards Palladium, how will this affect Samba?

    Not trying to create FUD but I'm just curious where things are heading. As it is now, anyone could setup a Samba server - which is great - and anything that makes interoperability between these operating systems is good, good for users of both OS's.

  2. Ease of Use, How to do it? by synq · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using samba for over 5 years now in a large company with a mixed flavour unix and windows network environment.

    When implementing samba I've always come across the same problems:

    • Unsufficient documentation available
    • E-mails for help to samba team members seem to get lost somewhere in /dev/null
    • Features that are reported to work don't and ones that are reported broken work perfectly
    • In the end it was always down to debug=999 in smb.conf and tcpdump. (But: I've implemented it on a solaris 2.6 sun cluster 2 machine supporting full failover capabilities and all.)
    • Once you find out what works and what doesn't you can use one version for years!

    The article says:
    It's very easy to use Samba as a PDC. Simply enable a few options in the Samba configuration file, add users to the local Samba password database, and build machine accounts for each Windows NT machine on the network.

    I find this at least peculiar.

    When you have 500 users you are not simply going to 'add users to the local samba password database', especially not when you need to run samba on more that 4 machines simultaniously. One of the things I had to do to get this working was sniff all the passwords from the network (wasn't too hard, since we use unencrypted NIS, so all passwords travel the LAN in plain text) and then add them to the smbpasswd file with a specially manufactured perl script.

    Also the 'simply enable a few options' isn't as simple as it seems, since even man smb.conf doesn't seem to have consequent answers for every switch you can set (and there are dozens of them).

    Most of the features that this article is about have been around for a few years now and still haven't improved much.

    I hope to see the day that installing and configuring samba for a medium to large corporation is really easy and clear. For now I'll just live with the kwirks.

    Just for the record: I'm not saying samba is a bad product, it just needs a lot of better documentation and ease of use and installation for larger userbases.

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