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'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."
Surely if anyone deserves this title it's Andrew Tridgell.
No disrespect or nothin', but did he write his own questions, too?
This wasn't an interview, this was a press release!
Oh well, such is the way of the world, I guess...
--LWM
Arrr. Samba-3 development an' support will continue until at least 2008. O'er that time 't will be gi'en th' ability t' integrate more seamlessly wi' Windows Active Directory an' its clients. Remote captainship features will be further expanded, an' a new remote procedure call infrastructure will replace th' current one, which will be keelhauled. Arrr. Additional facilities bein' added will assist sites that be havin' specific Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Th' myriad o' new technologies in Samba-4 will be aft-ported t' Samba-3, thus narrowin' th' gap between th' two versions. Samba-4 will ship within th' next voyage an' will live alongside Samba-3 fer a long time. Both versions will strive t' reduce resource requirements an' improve efficiency. Documentation improvements will also continue t' be made, wi' greater focus on support o' deployment an' wi' a lesser focus on th' nuts an' bolts in its internals.
...just about Samba 3. Samba 4 info can be found here
On the other hand you do end up with an IT department that knows linux.
When you discuss linux on your desktop with them they won't give you the stupid look you get from MS reboot monkeys.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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)
I believe Samba to be one of the great server-side pieces of software in Open Source for companies to slowly switch. This past week, I actually just switched my company's fileserver, and another computer doing domain logon into a single computer doing it all. Easy administration, small footprint (in comparison to windows) and shows restarts are rarely required ;) Next is to switch their desktops too! hehe
By allowing Windows desktop-clients to access filespace on Linux-servers, Samba effectively ensures that people can safely ignore the Linux-desktop.
<joke>Yes, and Apache serving HTML pages to IE effectively ensures that people can safely ignore the Linux desktop</joke>
The same argument comes up time and time again, most usually in respect to WINE, though usually as better disguised flamebait. Seriously though, if Windows won't play nice with Linux, and Linux won't play nice with Windows, then it comes down to what you need the most. It'd be a bigger pain to do without Windows than to do without Linux, ranging from drivers to applications to games and a host of applications I've come to know and like. And the last thing you want to do if you want people to switch, is to first build a chasm and then tell them to jump.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It would be nice, wouldn't it?
Of course, you don't actually have to use multiple user bases now. The winbind component can do out-of-the-box Active Directory integration and even map users to linux users. So there's nothing to complain about there.
There are a few big problems with it, though:
1) You can't have a backup for if your WINS system is down; Samba will not deal with both the original and the backup (because it won't sync the winbind produced groups/usernames with the existing groups/usernames).
2) UIDs and GIDs are mapped by Samba on the fly...so if they're different the second time you try it, too bad. You'll just have to chown any files that have the wrong permissions.
I don't really think that Samba's the way to go with this anyway. A better "out of the box" type solution would be to a version of pam_ldap that has built-in support for registering the unix box with an active directory, which is really the only piece that is still a kludge (to do pam_ldap+nss_ldap+mit_krb5+sasl, you have to manually get the keytab right now).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
No, you were supposed to take the answer out of context, make an irrelevant smart-ass remark, and get modded funny. And you have succeeded.
The question was about where adopting Samba would eventually lead businesses, not about why they should adopt it. And it certainly wasn't about you.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That's how it looks when someone knows how to answer questions. If you go back and look at those questions again you will see some real barbs. Allow me to point out some of the more dangerous ones:
For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?
This question came 2/3rds down the article when Linux was mentioned for the first time outside of the site name. The reporter is asking him to justify his product's and free software's existence. That a big question you can lose in daily details. His answer, "Linux is a first step toward organizational independence from single-vendor IT sources," is just what people want to hear.
Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?
This is a follow up to another question that together are tricky. The first question asked him, "What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 ..." John avoided the trap by not answering the first question litterally with one or two things and then rejecting the notion Samba is a "niche" product useful only to a few dozen small shops.
Those kinds of questions are classic. His answers are simply up to task. If you don't appreciate it, just let someone like Jan grill you one day. From a distance, behind good cover like John, the words look like honey. When they are in your face and you are trying to get other things done, they can look very hard. She's has been around longer than Linux and knows how to get a story. Bad answers to any of these questions would look bad but good answers are equally good.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Find free books.
Then type smbclient //i//love//forward_slashes. :-).
It's worked with that syntax for.... oh about 10 years, but then again this *is* slashdot so I can't expect you to know what you're talking about...
Jeremy.
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.
Your prediction is wishful thinking at best, because I don't see any realistic logic being applied in your post. Like in game theory, to find the most winning path you have to assume your opponent (Microsoft in this case) will be making the best moves it can in its favor. Microsoft is not going to sit around for 10+ years while others out-compete it. This, of course, will be good for consumers because as open-source solutions become better alternatives, Microsoft will have to provide even better solutions, which open-source solutions will have to improve on, so on and so on.
ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today
Ugh, that's a terrible selling point for your theory. Basically you're saying that FreeDOS can compete today with a product that was, for all purposes, shelved and not much developed on since 1995 (when Win95 came out as a standalone OS).
Well, yes. It's not really very unusual for people to work on projects because they want to contribute to the future, which means "the children" if you look at it that way. Why do you think it's odd?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Everybody was F U D Fighting!
Those hacks were fast as lightning!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The GP doesn't mention this outright but presumably he got it working with Windows after ditching Samba.
I would wager most people would rather be dumbasses with a working printer than a smartass with a broken one.
Everybody was Kung-FUD fighting
Those hacks were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they crack 'en expert typing.
They were funky Hacking dudes from funky IRC
They were hacking them up and they were hacking them down
It's an ancient Cracker art and everybody knew their part
From a p0f into nmap, and cracking with l0pht.
Everybody was Kung-FUD fighting
Those hacks were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they hack with typing a blazin'.
There was funky K'vin Mitnick and little Jon Johansen.
He said here comes the big mafia, lets get it on
We ping their host and made a stand, started DoS'ing with deft of a hand
The sudden BSOD made me lurch, now we're into a brand new stepping stones.
Everybody was kung-FUD fighting
Those hacks were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they flip it with incredible l33t typin'.
(repeat)..make sure you have expert typing
Kung-FUD fighting, had to be fast as lightning
Oh, feeling a little pissy are we?
I'm chuckling away.
Jeremy came at you as good as Winston Churchill dished it out.
So the story goes...
Nancy Astor was a native Virginian who became Britain's first woman member of the House of Commons. In the 1930's she headed a clique in the House of Commons that found something to admire in Hitler's Germany. Churchill described an Astorite as an appeaser "who feeds the crocodile hoping that it will eat him last." One time shortly thereafter, Churchill found himself at Cliveden, the Astor mansion.
After dinner Lady Astor presided over the pouring of coffee. When Churchill came by, she glared and said. "Winston, if I were your wife, I'd put poison in your coffee." "Nancy," Churchill replied to the acid-tongued woman, "if I were your husband, I'd drink it."
You simply got out classed. Jeremy did it politely and clearly. Quit yammering and slink home with your tail betwixt your legs. You got 0wned.
Cheers,
Greg
Just a quick fyi. The winbindd cache is persistent, so it will always map the same way on subseqent lookups. The winbindd uid/gid cache can also be remoted onto an LDAP server, making the cache common between multiple instances of winbindd on different machines. So it's not as bad as you paint it and is used in some very large organisations as their main mapping mechanism between Windows and UNIX.
Jeremy.
Doh ! oh I see, you meant the "inner" forward slashes, not the first one.
:-).
That's because I typed it wrong
Sorry,
Jeremy.
invoking a better future for children is just dumb.
It certainly isn't. There is a battle going on over who controls our software. Big software companies are trying to make us depend on their software and standards, OSS tries to do the opposite. Will our children be consumers who will be told what they want in the next corporate PR campaign or will they be citizens in control.
It's not about ethics or freedom, it is about money and power. It's about Microsoft being able to squeeze huge profits out of us not by making exceptional products but by controlling software standards that could have been open. It's also about monopolies breeding new monopolies, if we don't manage to stop it here it will go from bad to worse. So yes, Samba is a small part of an important fight and your ridiculing them isn't helpful.
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.
15 years from now, Microsoft will either be selling as strong as ever with whatever new items of interest that comes out or switching to a patten holding company. You could nuke redmond today and they could regear and support thier future existance for quite some time.
BTW, MS can't sue over Samba because they aren't copying anything except network commands thier product already accepts. Microsofts CIFS and SMB software is traced back to a public domain version of SMB. About the only way MS could sue would be if they changed the whole fundementals of thier file sharing services, required a special network card that only worked in windows and special cab ling to lock out any competition. Then they could claim DMCA violation when someoen tryed to crack it.
Actualy, it is in thier best interest to allow the competition to interact with thier software. As long as microsoft can stay one sustantial step ahead of them they arte doing good. Linux deployment won't surpass the number of windows servers for this field because of the money spent. Those using linux for file serving wouldn't be buying much from microsoft in that area in the first place outside thier desktop software wich seems to be the money maker. As long as people see an alternative to them, the masses won't wise up to thier tactics and revolt. It is a win-win situation for microsoft. even if it cuaes them to loose that part of the market.
It might be worth noting that by using idmap_rid as the idmap backend, you can get common uid/rid mappings on multiple samba servers without having to set up LDAP.
In a small AD implementation with a couple Linux boxes running samba, I find idmap_rid to be ideal. I run across folks with this level of need all the time.