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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.
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 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
"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.
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.
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.