'Mr. Samba' Talks About Samba's Future

Jan Stafford writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux is running an article that gives the inside scoop from Samba guru John H. Terpstra on upcoming new features in Samba-3 and Samba-4, recent events in FUD-fighting and the benefits that businesses can realize by adopting open source early."

Comments

Re:No more war.

[Spy der Mann]

I don't think that will be necessary. I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes, or haved moved completely to the gaming business.
The reason? In about 10 years, OpenOffice (or another clone) will kick MS-Office's arse, taking away Microsoft's main revenue. And maybe (MAYBE) by that time, ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today. I'm also confident that by that time Linux will have slowly evolved into a really-userfriendly OS.

Unless of course, in the edge of bankruptcy, Microsoft takes the decision to open source their OS and switch their business model to services - but that seems too far fetched.

(Oh - in any case you wonder what the talk was about, I was stating the reasons why Microsoft can't be suing Samba for their networking software)

Re:Samba is a bit clunky

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint: smbpasswd

Re:LDAP

[bezgin]

Another big problem is, one can't just install/configure the server and go away and be sure that will run without problems. Samba is mostly OK, unless users or other software mess with file permissions etc. and somehow users will always find a way to mess with it (murphy) most probably at friday afternoon, so the admin can sit the weekend in the server room and amuse himself with all geekish things all admins always do.
Users are to be taken as serious threat and I don't think that Samba protects itself good enough from user intervention. A very basic Samba installation to share a single printer can crash down the whole server due big temporary files filling the HDD because of a moron that chooses to use some other printer driver. OK, that is not directly a problem of Samba, but if it is there to manage the sharing of the printer, it has to have a better talk with the printserver and other system resources.
On the other side, such problems may be the only way to keep a job as an admin in the near future.

reality: it's hard

[bcrowell]

I think the reality is that stuff like Samba is extremely hard to do. I work at a community college, and I brought in my own linux box to have on my desk. I set up Samba for printing, and most of the time it worked, but once in a while it would stop the whole queue, which would piss off all my co-workers. So I gave up on Samba.

Some of my co-workers who have macs have mentioned similar problems. (They phrase it as "printing from macs doesn't work," but I assume MacOS X also uses Samba for this, and they're experiencing the same problem I was.)

It's just extremely hard to chase a moving target.

Re:No more war.

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes

I predict that in 15 years, microsoft will finally have gotten the patent on breathing air sucessfully badgered through and we'll all be paying $5000 a second to breathe. can't pay? then grow a set of gills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmon ey/31digi.html?ei=5090&en=b674d209b5106a1b&ex=1280 462400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=prin t

Frankly right now most linux software is violating as least ONE microsoft patent. even microsoft probably doesn't know which patents are being violated, seeing as how they have over 50,000 patents already. including a patent on double clicking. so don't get your hopes up. linux is dead the day microsoft can't make money through simple threats and extortion. fortunately that day will never come, because windows is number one, everyone has to support windows, of they can't make money. linux has to skirt around patents and try to hope they don't get sued into oblivion from the patents they don't know how to get around... and if linux ever gets too big for it's britches microsoft has 50,000 photon torpedoes(aka patents) ready to fire into any linux company that dares tread into the microsoft bottom line.

Microsoft has spent 20 billion dollars finacing drives to make software patents unilatirally accepted by the entire civilized world, so unless you want to go move to somalia to try and hack your linux kernel, with a gun to blow away any microsoft lakeys who try and tell you you're violating there patent law.. well you're fucked. microsoft owns the right to code an operating system, every key aspect that makes a modern operating system usable is patented either by them, or a competitor. who's signed agreements that prevent them from just 'giving' away the rights to there patents. so i predict in 15 years, we're all using microsoft products because everyone else is in prison, pennyless, or dead.

Re:The best make it look easy.

[lilmouse]

For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?

This one is the question I felt was most press-releasy - it's not a barbed question at all. Another way to ask it is:

Give us some propaganda on why Linux is so great, ok?

Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?

I actually liked this question - it seemed like one of the few real ones. It was a followup to his mentioning the specific things going into Samba 4 for the Sarbanes Oxley disclosure. It's a good question: what really neat, unusual things can Samba do? I can see why the question was sidestepped, but I'd've liked an answer.

Anyway, I'm not very interested in people saying "This is a great product." I want to know why it's a great product.

--LWM