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Tridgell and Samba Recognized
An anonymous reader writes "It's official, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell is Australia's smartest man... in IT anyway. He's received Bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100' award for the IT sector. He's also written about how Samba came into being, which was basically because he was trying to avoid doing any real work on his PhD. He also tells us how he discovered Linux and why he believes Open Source Software is superior to proprietary code... He also talks about rsync and his plans for the future..."
...about Linus Torvalds:
One of the most memorable parts of that evening was when my Linux NFS [Network File System] server died, to the point that the console seemed completely dead (the load of all those Doom WAD files obviously got to it). I was about to press reset when Linus stepped in and said he wanted to work out why it had crashed, so he could fix it. I then watched in complete amazement as Linus exploited a remote file truncation bug he knew about in the NFS server I was running which allowed him to peek into the proc filesystem on the apparently dead server and work out enough to find the bug. Up till then I had considered myself to be a pretty good programmer, and quite good at debugging system crashes, but that incident taught me that I would always be an also-ran who just isn't in the same league as
people like Linus.
This is from an interview here.
The Army reading list
One of Austrailia's nicest guys.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
And the reason we should _LOVE_ Andrew is not only samba (I mean, this is just a thing needed to be interopable with *that* OS), but a totally different thing.
RSYNC
Those having read his papers about the rsync protocol or attending one of Andrews seminars in the subject will definitively agree.
I hope a lot of you use rsync. It's a wonderful piece of software.
the biggest Australian movie star got his fame as a V-8 driving ex-cop loner with a sawed off shotgun
Who incidentally was born in upstate NY and lived there until he was 12.
The criminals and ne're-do-wells were mostly comprised of people who couldn't afford to pay the exhorbanant taxes, or 'stole the kings deer' by illegally hunting to feed their family. Any real criminal minds were hanged or otherwise killed.
Although 'Crocidile Dundee 1-3' Should be a crime in my book, the vast majority of Australians (and their ancestors) are in fact innocent, and not of criminal genetic stock.
Trolls, like Religion, dissappear when the truth comes to light.
It's Pizzaware!
:-)
1.9. Pizza supply details
Those who have registered in the Samba survey as "Pizza Factory" will
already know this, but the rest may need some help. Andrew doesn't ask
for payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza.
This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty
thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.
Method 1: Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain
and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do,
which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza
one night, courtesy of someone in the US
Method 2: Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit
card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be
collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany
did this.
Method 3: Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has
no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely
useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has
from Germany
Method 4: Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional
flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by
hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture.
-- Samba FAQ
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A little Aussie ingenuity goes a long way.
Un-news
i would have been nice to have more details on the future of RSYNC.w files.php?group_id=1148&release_id=276
and is using for synchronization.
RSYNC works on unix/linux
rsync worx on windows using cyygin.dll
Novell ported RSYNC to Netware http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/sho
So RSYNCS is definitely the product of choice for syncrhonization. What lies in future for RSYNC????
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I think that is common. Our LUG was founded and remains heavily influenced by this effect. Nice to know that so many are compelled to avoid their profs long enough to something useful
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
I always found Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly's story pretty interesting:
s world.com.au/
http://www.ironoutlaw.com/
http://www.nedkelly
Here's are a couple of Samba tutorials for ya'll to chew on: This tutorial shows you how to configure Samba as the primary domain controller, and this tutorial shows you how to turn a Unix or Linux system into a file and print server for Microsoft Windows network clients. Configure LDAP to serve as a user authentication source for Samba, and you've got a one-two punch.
Of course from a hacking standpoint, many of us have Tridge to thank for his work on the TivoNet card. That brought ethernet access to the TiVo, and his later work on video extraction made great use of the bandwidth. :)
:)
Thanks, Tridge!
Of course, he's given credit in the book Hacking TiVo.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
Don't forget Tridge was also the creator of the original TivoNET card. And the first to figure out how to remove the video from Tivo as well.
Admit it. With the exception of Apache, Samba is the number one reason that Linux (and BSD, too!) has been able to invade the datacenters of companies the world over.
:)
Without Samba, Linux et al would be in a much less pretty position.
Perhaps we should call it Samba/GNU/Linux?
Kudos to the Samba Team, Tridge, and all Samba developers/testers/users!
Fellowship 9/11
I am not an OS zealot. I enjoy the sunshine too much to worry about media drivers and file systems. However, Mr. Tridgell makes several comments I find incongruous:
First, he talks about his first attempt at Samba, "It really wasn't a very good piece of code, and it certainly wasn't very reliable, but the important thing is that I then decided to release it to the world for free.".
So from this, it would seem he would be arguing that it was bad code, written sloppily; but that released into the "wild" so to speak, it would return a better thing. I assume much like the peer review / criticism so normal in academia. Okay, I think I'm with him there.
Next, Mr. Tridgell talks about proprietary software and states, "We now have large numbers of programmers reinventing poorly designed bits of software, most of which will eventually be discarded and lost forever."
So, it's the "proprietaries" as I will not call them that only write bad code? Didn't he just suggest that his first attempt was poorly written. Or maybe he's arguing that it's continually poor no matter how many times it's re-written.
Finally, he states, "At the moment I'm working on Samba version 4, which is a rather major rewrite..."
It just seems to inconsistent. Bad code was sent out into the world and returned voila -- bad code. Why would Samba need a major re-write if the code weren't properly written in the first place? Isn't this just like a rewrite of Windows? It seems from his comments, that bad code won't be magically fixed in the world of open-source and I think it's not necessarily true that closed-source will just turn out garbage over-and-over again.
What you could argue is that samba and all open-source derivatives are more micro-economic driven. That, in the end, might be a good thing.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Admit it. With the exception of Apache, Samba is the number one reason that Linux (and BSD, too!) has been able to invade the datacenters of companies the world over ....
Perhaps we should call it Samba/GNU/Linux? :)
Well spoken!
-kgj
-kgj
Just proves that the Aussies are the slow ones... at least my ancestors had the sense to high tail it out of town when the local lord took offence to his deer ending up in thier stomaches.
Rsync is overrated. It's useful for files with local edits (eg, text and source code), but performs poorly on files which tend to have global, sparse, changes (eg, most data files, and all executables). Changing one character will result in an entire block being transmitted -- put another way, the bandwidth usage is O(n/k+kD), where n is the file size, D is the edit distance, and k is a parameter (the block size).
This is considerably worse than necessary; it is possible to cut the bandwidth down to O(n/k+kI+S), where n,k are as above, I is the number of inserts/deletes, and S is the number of substitutions. For executable files, this can easily result in a fivefold improvement.
Rsync is certainly a useful tool, but it isn't the synchronization-tool-to-end- all-synchronization-tools which many people consider it to be.
(Side note: I have the same DPhil supervisor as Andrew Tridgell, so I feel perfectly entitled to bash my fellow student's work.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Is my definitive method of remothe syncronization, without starting anything else than the ssh server.
rsync -e ssh -auvz this/dir/ user@otherhost:that/dir/
rocks! (of course it can be done in the other sense)
rsync -e ssh -auvz user@otherhost:that/dir/ this/dir/
Let's not forget he was also one of the first people to get to grips with TiVo hacking; see the TiVo ISA ethernet stuff for a start. Proper TiVo hardware & software hacking in the days before you could just buy a TurboNet from 9thTee...
Some tranportees were early trade unionists and socialists. Some of our American friends might find that that indicates a string criminal disposition :-)
No but, yeah but, no but...
So if it's possible, has anyone done it? If so, and another file sync tool exists which has superior bandwidth utilisation, why not post a link to it? Why hasn't it already become more popular than rsync?
You would really be "entitled" to bash rsync if you had come up with a superior implementation yourself, but I would hope you could at least point one out.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I went to SGI's "Linux University" a few years ago (back when they were saying, "We're about to release XFS for Linux, and here's why it's the best filesystem in the known universe"), and Jeremy Allison was one of the speakers. I enjoyed the session, and even got to talk to him for a few minutes afterwards.
One of the things that stuck with me was him expressing the hope that people would eventually stop using Samba because it would no longer be required. He regards SMB as an awful protocol, and isn't much for Windows as a desktop operating system either. I'm sure most software developers realize that their code, no matter how important now, will eventually fade away, but it's interesting to think of someone happily coding away and at the same time _hoping_ for the day when their primary project is no longer useful.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
"Samba and Tridgell Recognized", but I'll bet not recognized on the street. :-)
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
"Without Samba, Linux et al would be in a much less pretty position."
Actually I don't really believe that.
"With the exception of Apache, Samba is the number one reason that Linux (and BSD, too!) has been able to invade the datacenters of companies the world over."
Uh what about Bind and Sendmail? I love Samba as well but it comes at a waay distant 4th (if that) to those apps. Apache, Bind, and Sendmail are what got the free nix's in the door, Samba was just a nice bonus.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
What's the new spam algorithm mentioned at the end of the article? Is he doing more work on spamsum? Could be interesting.
unison is another excellent file synchronizer, someways better than rsync. It does true two way file synchornization.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
What I find really amusing is that this story hits Slashdot at about 2am Australian time (EST) and most likely will be off the page by the time most Australians wake up.
I'm only up because someone's machines in the US decided do some bungee jumping without the bungee.
And neither was the many-eyed OS borg communist collective community commune. Wow, nine years of being vulnerable. Truly sad.
Tridge is a genius. Humble one, too.
Strangely enough, I did recognize him on the street in NYC a few years back. Heard an Aussie accent, realized the man was talking about rsync... so I buttonholed him with a bunch of (probably inane) samba questions.
Really nice guy, took it all in stride.
Thanks, Tridge, and congratulations!
I'd tend to use slightly more objective words like patient, careful, wise, diplomatic, thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working and so on. In short, most of the useful characteristics I lack. (-:
Like most of the FOSS superstars, if you met him on the street you probably wouldn't recognise him. With a handful of exceptions, FOSS people are recognised primarily for their utility and productivity rather than for dashing good looks or social dexterity.
From what little I know of Tridge, he'd be hastening to point out countless other FOSS developers more deserving of such an award. While that's a very valid point, it doesn't make him any less deserving himself.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
IPTables (hi, Rusty!), PostFix, OpenOffice.org, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, Mozilla, the KDE suite... all of these make Linux useful as well. SaMBa is "just" one more "pluggable" component on the most popular server application framework in existence. It happens to be a very good one (as in, robust, extensive, flexible, secure).
Lest you think I'm only a one-eyed Penguinista, I've used and benefited from SaMBa running on Solaris, BSDi, *BSD, Irix, HP-UX and AIX too.
One piece of MS-Windows software which always amuses me is PuTTY. Why "PuTTY"? Well... it makes Windows useful. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
John Terpstra, co-founder of the Samba-Team, will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo on November 22nd at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. John will be giving an overview of Samba 3 including the ability to integrate into an Active Directory enviroment. Regular priced and student priced tickets giving full access to the event are still available. Free expo only tickets are also available using the "FREE" promotional code on the orders page. The Southern California Linux Expo is a non-profit event organized by LUG volunteers. [ Reply to This