Slashdot Mirror
Samba 3.0.0RC1 Released
dook43 writes "Samba 3.0.0 RC1 has been released as of 8/16. Probably the most important new feature is its Active Directory support, but the rest of the new features can be found at the website."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
...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!
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.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
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.
No sir I dont like it.
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 =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Got Code?