Andrew Tridgell Talks About The Future Of Samba

Spud writes "Andrew Tridgell tells us what Samba is up to in a new interview." Specifically, he talks about several new features planned for Samba 4.0, and says that the release of 3.0 will happen "soon."

Comments

Re:Frankly, samba needs to die.

[AJWM]

One thing at a time. Windows needs to die first, then Samba will wither away through lack of interest.

Excellent interview

[deek]

I especially liked the anecdote about Linus hacking a crashed server to find out what went wrong. Just goes to show how damn proficient the leader of the Linux world is.

I have now added the National Zoo & Aquarium to my list of must-see Canberra places (wow, my list has doubled :). Maybe they'll have Fairy penguin nipping sessions there 'specially for all the visiting geeks. Beats getting mauled by a koala (those things are real killers!).

Judging by the tidal wave of posts...

[leonbrooks]

...most readers have missed the significance of Samba4. Samba3 is already a better Windows fileserver than Windows, in several ways. Samba4 will give Tridge and team the flexibility to nail down every corner when it comes to compatibility and performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see features like distributed file stores appear out of this; y'know, rather than buy a $30,000 obsolete-tomorrow monster (and spend another $30-60,000 for MS-seats - "here's your frame, motor, panels and wheels, sir; and how many people will you be buying seats for?"), you buy three reasonable $5000 boxes and get better performance, automatic load-sharing and failover.

Re:Frankly, samba needs to die.

[Xtifr]

Frankly. you're right (and don't deserve the flamebait mods). And the ironic part is that Samba is one of the best run projects around. I have tremendous admiration for the entire team, I think they're some of the sharpest folks in the community. I admire Jeremy Allison almost more than I admire Linus, he's savvy and quotable. It's an excellent project that is solid, reliable very useful, and gains a lot of admiration for OSS in general. And what they're doing is hard. And yet I agree with you that Samba needs to die. (After helping to kill Windows, of course.)

But I'm not really worried. These guys are sharp, and after it becomes time for Samba to die (which will not be as soon as most of us might like), I'm sure they'll all find other interesting things to work on. And in the mean time, they seem quite happy to work on this currently-still-very-important software for us. Kudos to all the Samba team.

Re:Frankly, samba needs to die.

[archeopterix]

If any Linux application can be named the main windows killer, it's Samba.

Remember the Microsoft TCO bullshit campaign? It was mainly targeted against Linux as a replacement for Windows SMB servers. Each computer running linux/Samba is:

1. A computer running linux.
2. A computer not running windows.

Now, 1. gets the management to see that Linux does well in their environment. This doesn't have a measurable financial effect, but influences future decisions. Samba gets the penguin's foot (paw?) in the corporate door. Point 2. cuts directly into Microsoft income.

To sum it all up: Go, samba!

Re:Frankly, samba needs to die.

[Mawbid]

I haven't even glanced at the Samba source, but by the sound of things, it's sufficiently organized and decoupled that the post-CIFS, post-NFS network filesystem might just be most easily implemented within the Samba project.

Every now and then, I go looking at the network/distributed filesystems (particularly looking for disconnected operation) and every time I find there's still something majorly wrong with all of them. I can't think of anyone I'd trust more than the Samba team to bring that kind of thing out of the research/toy department into the real world. Not just because they know network filesystems, but because they have all this experience in maintaining a solid product of such great importance to its users.

So I'm hoping that what these guys work on after Samba is ...Samba!