Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Working For Samba Interoperability
JP writes "Andrew Bartlett of Samba fame has written a document describing their recent collaboration with Microsoft's Active Directory team. In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. However according to Andrew the Samba AD team is currently very short on manpower, so if you have network experience, now is the time to get coding."
and this will probably be of some benefit to Microsoft, since playing well with other operating systems must always be an advantage.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
I could probably make some small contribution but have neither the time nor inclination to set up the dev and test environment.
For projects of this magnitude a site that could be ssh'd to, 'check out' a dev environment slice would make it a whole lot more practical for folks to work on a small bug or enhancement.
Me too. Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Seems like a good time for some of the larger distros to help Samba out.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Snowballs are making it through hell, is what I believe was implied. Pigs are flying.
AD must not be the holy grail anymore, but I'm not complaining. Openness to the FOSS community isn't a Microsoft trait, but as long as they have this deal with Novell/SUSE that's making them a mint, why not try and make it work? After all, they can look inside SAMBA with no obstacles to learn about their own code.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You seem to not read carefully the most important part: "Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD"
M$ engineers are normal folks like you and me. Well, probably not me. The all cr*p breaks loose when M$ management gets involved and start pushing its political agendas.
If cooperation between AD and Samba folks would be successful, rest assured some M$ managers would try to stick themselves into the project to get a free share of credit for the success.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If MS is truly working with Samba to get it 100 percent, what I'd REALLY like to see (and I won't believe they ARE working with SMB until then) is non-encrypted passwords.
SHARE the SMB password system, make it available, so not every friggin windows machine has to do unencrypted passwords across the network to access SAMBA shares / printers / whatever.
That's always been my BIGGEST stumbling block. Linux is touted as being so secure, but then it has to use unencrypted passwords to chat with the desktop clients for sharing.
I KNOW it's an MS problem (their authentications schemas are proprietary), but if they claim to be trying for interoperability (which, they probably are), this was / is my biggest hurdle to accepting *nix in a windows shop.
--Toll_Free
I work for a company that does a lot of integration for enterprise customers. Sometimes there are spaces for Microsoft products in an otherwise Unix environment. Our customers happen to be pretty set on using Unix in general, so for Microsoft, it makes sense to make sure that their products can fit into an environment like that without any hassle. After all, a small sale is better than no sale.
Due to NDA's, MS Engineers are probably not being helpful without management.
Whether or not management CONTINUES to allow them to be helpful, remains to be seen.
You DID bring up a good point, though.
--Toll_Free
Clearly, it's a sign of the Apocalypse. Dogs and cats living together and all that.
... and then claim patent or copyright infringement.
I am officially gone from
The sky is falling.....
.....simply descibes the level of cynicism and bias that slashDot and a vast majority of it posters have toward anything Microsoft. They don't believe that Microsoft does or creates anything good. So when Microsoft does do just that, it must mean that the sky is falling.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Long ago, being having compatibility with Microsoft's file sharing backend would have been a big win, but the target has moved and, let's face it, Samba still isn't very easy to set up.
In this case, Microsoft knows the knife is cutting both ways. The low-end license buyers won't bother paying for a Linux admin, so it doesn't harm Microsoft one bit.
Microsoft's biggest customers buy the whole mess that includes their mail server and a bunch of other back office crap that remains totally closed.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Sigh. This is actually a pretty good analogy. The soldiers being the programmers just do what they are told to do by their superiors. Somebody in the upper echelons of Microsoft said quit shooting. The programmers, being programmers, revert to talking shop with their comrades-in-arms.
Fail.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I cannot believe the samba team is down to ONE full time developer.
Its a HUGE project to undertake.
When I buy my Red Hat, Suse or Ubuntu thingies for money, Im thinking some of that money goes to helping FOSS developers.
Hey, it better be that way guys: put some dough into Samba.... NOW!
NO SIG
Its already interoperable, but the MS AD team isn't going to stop adding features just because its going to break the desktops of people who don't pay them. But if they break things too much, they get sued to death over their monopoly. Their only solution is to make sure the Samba project keeps up, so its what they do.
Wouldn't this be a GOOD time to have legal drones getting involved? No, not Microsoft's lawyers, the ones that will protect the interests of the Samba intellectual property?
I'm not suprised.
For a long time Microsoft has had a package called Services For Unix that you can install on Windows. It allows Windows to act as a server but not a client with respect to standard *nix protocols like NFS.
Microsoft wants to replace *nix in the server space by breaking into purely *nix environments and replacing an entrenched server operating system with their operating system.
Whether this is done by making Windows interoperable with the protocols that are already on the clients or changing the clients to interoperate with Windows as a server is immaterial.
Unless they're making it easy for people to replace Windows AD servers with Samba servers running on Linux, this is not a big deal.
Right, and they are doing that because they are good, right? I know that nobody RTFA, but here is an excerpt, just for you :-)
In September 2007 Microsoft lost it's appeal of the 2004 anti-trust
Decision by the European Commission. As as result, Microsoft was
required to make protocol documentation available to competitors.
MS has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, bankers, and every other stakeholder. For them not to defend their IP would open them up to lawsuits from their stakeholders. And for that matter, giving away their IP as others have suggested would also create the same outcome.
You see, business decisions are not black and white; good or evil; or your typical adolescent binary reasoning that prevails here on Slashdot. If some company that I invested my retirement savings into decided one day to give away their IP to be "good" and cave to the F/OSS community with no business plan on how to compensate for the loss of revenues, I would sue the management for gross malfeasance. Now, to head off the folks who would say that you can make up the revenues with services and support, I would like to point out that service and support companies are a dime a dozen, actually, that business plan has become a commodity worth as much as becoming a landscaper or a house cleaner - which I get a business card per day on average from folks who are in that business.
MS will release Open Source AD compatible Samba - which everyone will use and will come with some weird license that everyone will argue with and MS will simply wipe out all products that use the MS AD Samba.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
How hard is this to understand?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Did you replace AD with it or did you create an NT4 style domain? IMO I have never been able to achieve the AD replacement piece despite my best efforts with OpenLDAP and Kerberos and early releases of samba4. The first time anything expects to operate against a "real" active directory be it some remote software trying to authenticate, a NAS/filer, or software that "integrates" with AD, the setup has always fallen on its face. After a few attempts is simply becomes cheaper to deploy AD.
The problem now is that a lot of new hardware and software coming out is getting harder and harder to shoehorn into samba/NT4 style environments. You have to jump through hoops to get it to work and a lot of times you have to sacrifice features or security when you do make it work. So this is a problem in "the enterprise."
But it's starting to get bad with "the consumer" too. When a manufacturer's samba-running $99 NAS box that has worked great for a home user for years suddenly wont work with a new Vista machine it's perceived as microsoft's problem.
Depending on your opinion of the matter, these might or it might not be really Microsoft's fault, but in any case they do have an interest (and by that I mean a financial incentive) in making sure their garbage works with everyone else's garbage.
This place is chock full of morons like that, and it seems that many of them have unlimited mod points. Thanks for fighting the good fight.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.