Samba 3.0.0RC1 Released

Changes to Auth system by notque · 2003-08-17 11:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

3) New authentication system. The internal authentication system has
been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal,
but the new auth system is also very configurable.

Does this mean I won't have to authenticate for every directory I access?

(Or are we misconfigured from the get go, and I should know and fixed such an issue :)

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Re:Changes to Auth system by aled · 2003-08-17 12:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

To be fair I just checked the samba site and the new documentation seems to be much better and more detailed.

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"I think this line is mostly filler"
Re:Changes to Auth system by silas_moeckel · 2003-08-17 12:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yes documentation should be the expert on the topic written for somebody with a background in real engineering (your average MSCE dosent count) let the howto's and the for dummys books deal with spoon feeding cookbooks to end users if your having the authoritive person on the subject write documentation aka the programming team write the most technical documentation you should ever need without having to do redo code yourself.

I say this because there are to many porly documented applications out there. Documentation to often is looked at by the marketing department and dumbed down so nobody might get scared of it. If you have ever looked at the home service manual for a Saturn (the $500 one thats an option) that nearly would allow you to machine replacment parts thats documentation. Want something easy to read with pretty pictures get a for dummy's book aka the dumbed down book from somebody that read and understood most of the documentation.

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No sir I dont like it.

Another bonus by cleverhandle · 2003-08-17 11:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

...besides the features is some absolutely outstanding documentation. The old 2.x docs were basically a really long HOWTO. The new docs are broken into self-contained chapters that start by laying out how a certain task or protocol work in general, and then how to configure Samba to take part in it. Considering that Samba can perform so many different roles, the mix-and-match method is a lot more sensible. Even if you don't use Samba, consider their docs as a reference for troubleshooting Windows problems - I've found they offer a far more complete and focussed discussion of Windows technologies for the sysadmin than any MS book or webpage.

Great job, Samba team!

Re:Lucky Linux users by AstroDrabb · 2003-08-17 12:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

Are you suggesting that AD is a good LDAP server? If so you are very wrong. AD really blows is and is very slow. I remember a statement from MS about them getting 2.x million entries into their AD server, at about the same time Novell announced 1 billion! The only reason any effort is made within the Linux community to work with AD is because it is needed to work in many MS networks. Also, AD is an LDAP server with proprietary crap tacked on that MS does not share. I think the Samba team have made some great gains with SMB and now AD all from reverse engineering.

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If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison

Re:additional new feature by cheezit · 2003-08-17 12:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

Vanilla LDAP != inherently better than AD. There are some crappy LDAP servers out there. Whatever you can say about openLDAP, the management and administration side of it is primitive.

I consider AD to be a viable general-purpose LDAP server for certain applications. I'm using it for a 20K user directory right now...but I wouldn't go over 250K with it, especially one that required any kind of master-hub-replica architecture to scale.

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Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Re:Lucky Linux users by cheezit · 2003-08-17 13:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

Proprietary crap? Please elaborate.

The standard stuff is fairly standard. inetOrgPerson is available as an add-on (which I think is lame, but you can get there from here). Many of the other "compliant" directories have their own blind spots too.

The nonstandard stuff is sometimes doc'd, sometimes not; for instance, if you are expecting full docs on how GPOs are represented in the database, you will be disappointed. Then again, why would you code to their goofy extension?

One thing I think is *lame* is the 5k size limit on number of users in static groups. We are using dynamic groups/roles for some stuff, but static groups are a useful adjunct to that. 5k is just pathetic.

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Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Wins support by archen · 2003-08-17 13:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

Anyone know how the wins support is? It looks like samba 3 will finally be able to replicate. Currently Samba can't replicate with NT servers, or as far as I know, even with other Samba servers. That sort of limits Samba in terms of redundancy. Is adding static entries to WINS new as well? I don't recall ever seeing that in the samba 2 documentation - that's been an unfortunate hang up where I work.

Re:this bugs me by shis-ka-bob · 2003-08-17 13:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

I don't understand your issues. CIFS/SMB is a protocol controlled by Microsoft. The Samba team has no ability to 'do anything' about the protocols. The EC may have the ability to force Microsoft to release full documents of the protocol, but the Samba team can only ready what they can and reverse engineer the rest.

There are plenty of of more elegant solutions for filesharing that have been developed and implemented in an open manner. AFS was designed at CMU and OpenAFS is largely the result of U of Michigan. This is certainly inovative and it is also open source. Painting 'open source' as a monolithic entity is silly, you may as well say that "I knew an MIT grad and he was a git, so all MIT grads are gits."

I have no reason to make Linux 'act like' Windows at home, where I can run a LInux network. However, at work I don't have that luxury. Networking with Windows is a reality. For this, Samba is an amazingly good piece of kit.

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Think global, act loco

Re:Cool feature that is easy to miss by afidel · 2003-08-17 13:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

The problem is none of the Unix filesystems do snapshots the right way for a client facing system. They all do a whole filesystem at a time snapshotting, not just change vectors. MS and Netapp on the other hand do it correctly and simply store the changes. This makes snapshots of infrequently changing data take up significantly less room. Veritas style snapshots are really aimed at datacenters that want to be able to backup their database to a certain point in time while not effecting the live system. The one thing MS does wrong is place the revisions in a FIFO buffer where the 64th oldest backup is always the one that gets pushed off, I would like to be able to do things like you can on the netapp and make hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups, with the MS solution you can only keep a couple days back if you want to do hourly backup points.

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There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

Re:Watch the free coders out code MS when... by afidel · 2003-08-17 13:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

Actually it's funny but the guys on the SAMBA team know more about the SMB protocol than anyone currently working for MS. I remember reading a tech conference note from one of the team members back before 2.0 went final and he had talked to one of the senior design guys from MS and the guy couldn't answer some questions about the reasoning behind the design of certain parts of SMB, he had simply inherited the codebase and designed extensions to it to do the new things for windows 2000, he knew very little about the history or design behind the overall protocol framework. Don't attribute to mallice what can be more easily explained by ignorance =)

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There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

Re:Which is why... by pantherace · 2003-08-17 14:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm working on it :) (and need testers...)

I just got back from a weekend retreat, but I have written a script/gui for doing this, and it works fine in production (where the people know what they are doing) but the setup is pretty automatic, and the gui (based on kommander (part of quanta atm)) allows a simple gui interface to the setup, which should all work, but as I said I need people to play with it and break things!

It should work for gentoo and redhat, atm.

sloppyadm.sourceforge.net if you are interested in helping.

Samba is the greatest by codepunk · 2003-08-17 14:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

Samba makes it very easy to get a linux box on a customers network. It also allows me to undercut the hell out of competitive bids in our area. All we are competing against it a bunch of vendors in the area and all they know how to do is windows and MS products. This allows us to completely smear any and all bids we run against them. We are doing it as much as we can right now because as linux spreads it is going to get a whole lot harder to do this and still make the profits we are making.

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