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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
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
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.
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
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
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
Samba often needs rewrites because of the scope of changes that MS make to their protocols and authentication mechanisms. The samba team will ALWAYS be one step behind on this one because they have to wait and see what MS do and then respond.
"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."
His argument, I think, is that with closed source, dozens of companies are all writing bad code to do the same thing, whereas with open source, that bad code only has to be written once... and then either the programmer soon gets so embarassed that they end up rewriting it properly, or someone else gets so disgusted that they do so.
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.
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.
I come from an academic background, where it's perfectly acceptable to bash someone based on theory.
Yes, the code is coming. But it takes time to write; give me a few months, ok?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Why would Samba need a major re-write if the code weren't properly written in the first place?
Because things evolve. If you ever write a program and can't think of ways to improve it when you're "done" then you've failed as a programmer -- you've learned nothing from the experience. There is no such thing as perfect code. There's always another feature, another bug, or a more elegant (easier to understand and extend -- if it happens to be more efficient then that's a bonus) way to do things.
Eventually you reach the point at which the code base has been extended so many times that it's become crufty, and crufty code is likely to be buggy code. At that point you can either walk away from it, ignore the cruft (this is a valid decision), or decide to rewrite large portions. This doesn't mean that the code was poorly designed. Sure, some parts of it may look poorly designed now, but that may be because the world has changed and the original requirements are no longer the same as real world requirements. You may have simply extended the code beyond the point the design intended. It happens. Saying that the code is poorly designed because of this is the same as saying that a small rural bridge is poorly designed because it would collapse if a 70T tank tried to go over it.
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.
I don't know how you got that from the comments. The idea is that open source code doesn't come back as bad -- it gets refined over time from many eyes and many hands and comes back as better (if not good). Closed source doesn't inherently turn out crap -- but it doesn't get the advantage of many eyes, many hands, and virtually unlimited time. Code reviews can do a good bit toward eliminating this disadvantage though, but not enough companies do them. And being pressed for time doesn't help in writing good code (but unlimited time does not inherently give you good code either!).
Yes, the code is coming. But it takes time to write; give me a few months, ok?
Call it nsync!
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
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.
He didn't write the code with that flaw in it, I did.
So did you get exploited by this flaw ? Did you lose data or
get compromised ? Do you have a legitimate complaint, or are
you carping anonymously about "communist collective's" because
you don't know how to code yourself, and you fear them ?
The psychology behind comments like this is interesting to me,
I always wonder if you're the same kind of people who "key"
expensive cars because you don't own one ? Did you ever write
software yourself ? Do you know how ?
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
...and probably Canberra's nicest. Not that there's a lot of competition.
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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