Samba 4 Reaches "Susan" Stage

superfebs writes "Some day ago Samba4 reached a pretty serious test stage. Promises are beautiful: full SMB protocol implementation, Active Directory Domain Controller facility, and more; here's a full roadmap."

Comments

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, that if it wasn't for Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, most of the ideas in Samba 4 would never have even been thought of, never mind implemented.

It'd be nice if they gave him some credit somewhere instead of just blanking him out because he 'rocked the boat'.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Is he the guy behind Samba TNG?

I never knew the name but was told that he was difficult to work with. Classic innuendo tactics really, unless it happens to be the truth and that I can't judge.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[lkcl]

yeh, i'll accept that - both parts.

i see patterns. i mean i SEE patterns. it freaks people out. especially those people who are insecure in their abilities and position.

one thing i do have a lot of difficulty with when i fail to explain or get across a deep understanding of a complex topic.

i find it particularly frustrating in areas where people are supposed to have the capabilities and expertise to cope with a certain level of complexity.

but - basically - the one way to absolutely GUARANTEE to make me see pink mist is for you to be dishonest. whereever i find people being dishonest with themselves, me, or other people, i WILL go for the throat - without fail.

and it gets me into difficulties. c'est la vie.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[lkcl]

one other thing that i really should make clear is that i used - and still use - a programming technique which recently gained a name: "extreme programming".

basically what i do is i build up a picture in my head of what results i want to achieve, and how, in broad architectural terms that that picture should be built.

then i start incessantly, repeatedly, rapidly, bluntly and brutally chipping away at the details: in the case of coding that could result in 30 cvs commits per day.

does this work? oops, no it didn't, let's try something else.

occasionally, usually due to exhaustion or frustration, i would sit and re-think.

i bounced hundreds of messages off of the samba mailing lists, most of which were not actually understood but that was okay because it allowed me to think out loud.

this process drove jeremy allison completely nuts.

jeremy's development model was radically different: very controlled, very calculated, very infrequent cvs commits (relatively speaking) - if it's not ready, if it don't work, it ain't going in the cvs repository.

contrast this with me having at best a pentium 90 with 16mb of memory (my fastest machine) and having to do partial-builds (ccache didn't exist) due to a complete build taking 90 minutes, and random cvs commits in case someone stole my computer from the cybercafe... ... i frequently had no choice but to commit in code at the risk of breaking the build.

this also drove jeremy nuts.

c'est la vie.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[lkcl]

working with others requires cooperation both ways.

_i_ have learned where i have failed.

now PLEASE will you do me the favour of communicating to andrew and to jeremy where THEY have failed.

the samba team is not a team at all: it is a group of people who work on their own areas with hardly any actual cooperation at all.

i WISH that the samba project had an ASF charter, with an additional clause that lends equal weight to "strategic" decisions in the part about code being accepted on "technical merit".

if the ASF charter was in place on the samba project, so many many people would not have left it in frustration.

there is much more that i could say but the number of comments on this topic is getting high (and consequently thinner), and is distracting me from my work.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[lkcl]

p.s. they didn't throw me off: i left. too many incredibly hurtful comments from andrew. the one i will always remember is where he thanked tim potter for completing winbind, without acknowledging that i had helped nor that winbind would have even been possible without the dce/rpc client libraries i'd written.

Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

I'm only going to say one thing here, and then leave it at that. As has been pointed out before, Luke has a very selective memory about his involvement with Samba.

Yes he made substantial contributions, for which we were very grateful, but in the end the difficulties in working together outweighed the benfits.

I'm not going to say any more - those who are interested can read the relevent email archives.

Jeremy.

Samba's great

[Stevyn]

It can be a pain to set up at first because you have to deal with config files, but once it's set up, it Just Works (TM).

My little network at my apartment has two windows machines (roommates), my linux machine, and the xbox with XBMC. I can share movies and music across the network and it always works. The xbox and the windows machines can always see shared directories.

On the other hand, SMB on the windows xp and windows 98SE only works some of the time. I can always count on mine working though.

Good job, samba team!

Re:Andrew Tridgell - a free software hero

[Anonymous Coward]

Robocopy, part of the Windows resource kits, is what I use on Windows.

Easy to install?

[DoktorTomoe]

Ever tried to add some Redhat servers to a windows domain with user-account given automagically by Active Directory? Tried for 2 days, gave up...

I certainly hope the configuration is more userfriendly now.

Fix LDAP first...

[illumin8]

It would be nice if they actually fixed their LDAP code so that it would work with any directory server other than OpenLDAP. The fact of the matter is, I spent the last month trying to get PDC functionality to work with iPlanet Directory Server, and even Netscape Directory Server, which coincidentally Redhat just purchased, and the buggy Samba implementation of LDAP as a storage mechanism for account information just doesn't work with anything other than OpenLDAP. Users on a Windows XP workstation can't authenticate, and sometimes they can authenticate by the XP client gets a BSOD right after authenticating. It's bizzare, it's actually as if Samba is sending the XP client a buffer overflow while authenticating. If someone can prove me wrong I would be happy to hear it.

I spent weeks working with RHEL technical support, and even had one of the Redhat support techs rebuild my environment, and sure enough, his users can't authenticate either (and experience the same BSOD).

I'd love to be able to replace my entire Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux, but until Samba can actually provide a backup domain controller functionality that works with our existing LDAP infrastructure, I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.

Can you believe the only workable enterprise-level solution for Samba is to make the Samba server a domain member of an Active Directory domain? And then you still have to purchase Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs) for all of your workstations, saving you $0!!! (Not to mention your RHEL license and support fees which are more expensive than Windows 2003 Server)....

Fucking ridiculous... If I sound a little pissed off it's because I wasted a month of my time trying to get this buggy software to work properly and even Redhat enterprise support just threw up their hands and said: Sorry, it's not supported and doesn't work.

Re:Fix LDAP first...

[ink]

BTW, does Windows Server support any LDAP back-end that is not Microsoft's Active directory?

Shhhhhh. Microsoft doesn't have to work with 3rd parties; the 3rd parties are responsible for reverse-engineering Windows and working perfectly with every possible combination that an end user may choose. And, god forbid anyone track down the bugs with iPlanet and fix them... it's much more efficient to complain about it on Slashdot.

FWIW, we have PDC/BDC witih Samba3; and we previously used a 'hot standby' Samba2 server in a PDC/coldPDC configuration. Samba is incredible; we love it. We're even using <gasp> OpenLDAP with Samba3 right now. It plugs in with Squirrelmail, Courier, Exim, Apache, Tomcat, Coldfusion, and a buch of custom applications. Oh, and I also wrote a Samba-to-fax gateway that doesn't require any Windows programs to work (and works from any OS). It's a verah niiice.

Re:Implementing Microsoft "Standards"

[JohnnyKlunk]

OK, I know it's popular to bash MS here, but precisely what is the the horror that is AD on XP? Like MS or not if you've got x thousand users needing shared file/print resources across multiple servers / sites then AD with XP does a pretty reasonable job. It's easy to administer, easy for users to understand and the flexibility of clever combinations of site / ou / group based policies give a level of intuitive usability that very little else will provide.

Bash MS all you like. I dont like alot of their stuff either, just give some evidence for the stuff you dislike and admit to the stuff they do well.

Not sure why this is in the `Linux' category ...

[dougmc]

I'm not quite sure why this story is in the Linux Slashdot category. Yes, the story is on Linux Today, but Samba runs on pretty much any *nix platform. (It wouldn't even surprise me if it ran on win32 under cygwin. That would be a bit wierd, but ...)

The BSD and Apple categories would be just as appropriate. Perhaps Slashdot needs a *nix category ...

several additional daemons

[lkcl]

yes - i wanted to introduce several stand-alone daemons, for several reasons:

1) project manageability.

you tell people that samba is 350,000 lines of code and they freak out. you tell them that they can work on say writing a special samr daemon (e.g. a sql db one) which would be oh about 30-50k lines, and they start to calm down a bit.

2) clear delineation and separation of code at logical boundaries.

the complexity of the samba project was getting out of hand, and it is still out-of-hand.

by introducing separate services, which almost every other implementor of NT-compatible servers have done, you don't end up feeling like you've swallowed a tiger. ... would anyone DREAM of merging postfix, cyrus, nntpd and apache into a single daemon??

3) commercial and other-licensed-projects can interoperate.

sun microsystems would never have bothered to license AT&T's AFPS code [NT 3.5 ported to SysV by microsoft - badly - and bought by AT&T].

or, at least, if they had, they would have chucked away the file-server part of it, and used smbd as the file server, whilst still using the NT-based services from NT 3.5-ported-to-unix!

and they would have used the published interfaces - the ones used to communicate with the external DCE/RPC services.

the reasons i was quoted AGAINST doing separate services were that a) it would be several milliseconds too slow (which is a rubbish argument on a network-based protocol) and b) unix domain sockets cannot be used securely (which, given that they are used in winbind is again rubbish)

no, the real reasons why samba was not turned into separate daemons was a) so that samba could be used to maintain control as a single GPL project b) because i was the one advocating it c) the level of complexity was not understood and i failed to explain it clearly enough.

Re:several additional daemons

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you had better ideas and better code but, your fork died and the original branch continued.

Your fork died because the original branch refused to merge your "superior" code and concepts? Come on, who's kidding who?

SAMBA did not force you to abandon your fork. You could have continued with the SAMBA TNG fork. Had you produced superior concepts and code, as you claimed to have, I doubt that the community would continue to use the original "inferior" branch.

Re:Why promote a standard that encourages MS locki

[sethadam1]

Well, first off, eDirectory which replaces NDS already runs in a Linux environment. Secondly, Samba is an implementation of SMB, which is what Microsoft uses. Samba would not seek to replace Novell servers, because they don't work using SMB (aka CIFS).