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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."
"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"
The bolded part is a euphemism for "disaster in progress".
Forgive my naivety, but isn't this a good thing (as much as MS collaboration can be)? Why is this a "sky is falling" situation?
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
There's no car analogy to describe my deranged stare.
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.
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.
This seems roughly akin to two soldiers from opposing armies suddenly having brunch and discussing the finer points of shooting people.
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.
This guy asked a relevant wuestion, albeit mking a minor html mistake in the process, and some jackass mod comes in and carpet bombs him? I want to know the same thing, this seems like a good thing, but submitter makes it out to be something else with his terminology. So, is it a good thing or not? And to whomever modded this guy down, you're a jerk and you owe him an apology.
... and yet the Cubs still can't win the World Series. :(
... and then claim patent or copyright infringement.
I am officially gone from
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
The samba team already made sure it was interoperable. You can use samba/ldap as an AD replacement.
I have done it.
MS just wants to save some customers by doing this. I say it's not going to work all that well.
Those customers are probably not going to ditch windows desktops for linux anytime soon though.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I agree.
I bet this is about a semi-fold on their server platform, to maintain desktops.
They can give-up AD servers, and push exchange and share point and Desktops/Office.
the AD is the weakest (least important) part of there monopoly, especially in mid-sized businesses.
If they provide the clients, and the messaging, and the document sharing, and even the remote desktops. The actual authentication is moot.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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
Remember when IBM was the Microsoft of it's day? Now it's a darling because it learned a valuable lesson....
Ultimately companies that create standards will eventually have to transition to a company that contributes to them.
I'm no M$ fan at all and that goes back a ways for me. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to be showing signs that they have accepted open source as something that's here to stay (although they hate it).
Next up on the radar? Google
Once they became a publicly traded company, responsible for only making a profit for their shareholders, it appears more and more like their motto should transition to "We do less evil than everyone else"
Normally I'd agree, but right now it seems there's more to it than that. Microsoft is trying to stop the whole "getting sued to oblivion because of their monopoly" thing.
-They open source .NET (notice I'm not using capital letters here. Its not real open source, but you can see the code) .NET projects are fully open source (for real)
-Silverlight running on multiple platform, and they're helping out the Linux version, plus are funding efforts to make a cross-platform eclipse-based set of tools.
-Many of their new
-They are packaging and distributing open source (even GPL in some cases) apps in easy installers (not code they control: the installer pull it from the original web site, so its not "extended)
-They are embedding LGPL (I think thats the license) stuff in some of their core products (jquery in Visual Studio)
-There's more that I forget.
All of this aside the first one happened in the last couple of -months- (weeks in many cases). The first one is fairly recent.
Part of it, like I said, is because of all the lawsuits over their monopoly. Another part (some of the above fit in that category) are from the inside: some of MS' own employees with influence want to see better open source integration.
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.
Duh. Good engineers with no PHB supervision will tend to to great things. Even the ones at Microsoft.
What makes Microsoft Microsoft is the fact that engineers are very rarely left under little or no PHB control. When they are, news like that will follow.
You have confused SMB, NMB, and SMBX, which Microsoft calls CIFS.
SMB is not all that different in how it works from FTP. Its a TCP Protocol that operates on Port 139.
NMB (NetBios Message Block) is how Windows provides SMB with services like Name Resolution. It also handles things called Browser elections which determine who the Domain Controllers will be.
Windows NT4 and 9x is hard Coded to only allow use of NMB to resolve SMB names. This was a horrible lockin tactic for Windows NT4 Server. Windows 2000 on can use NMB or DNS.
SMBX operates on port 445, and acts independantly of NMB and SMB.
Linux machines from Samba 2.2 on could use DNS to resolve SMB paths. Even though Windows machines are hard coded not to allow that.
Another lockin tactic with SMB was the use of the UNC (Universal Name Convention) which was FAR from Universal. The proper URI for smb is smb://. Konqueror has it right.
So, that should clear that up.
The worst offense Microsoft ever did was when they added the PAC to Kerberos. If there is a beacon shining in the night why the GPL is superior to the BSD liscence, the Kerberos PAC that has kept Active Directory Dominant for almost ten years should be a becon in the night. MS Kerberos PAC is incompatible with virtually EVERY SINGLE Kerberos server out there.
With MS increasing 'interoperability' with FOSS, many Universities are standardizing on MS products...
e.g. Oxford University, UK http://blogs.msdn.com/ukhe/archive/2008/10/22/oxford-university-and-microsoft-launch-it-collaboration.aspx
In the past, one of FOSS's heartlands was in higher-education, where linux systems do a lot of science work, producing thousands of graduates with linux experience.
Today, academics in faculties can no-longer demand the use of open, standards-based systems from their central IT since MS is 'open enough'. Don't believe me? Look at the language in the Oxford announcement.
Of course to get the full benefit of the 'open' MS system, you need to use MS products...
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.
[Services For Unix] allows Windows to act as a server but not a client with respect to standard *nix protocols like NFS.
I use SFU solely for enabling my Windows boxes to connect to NFS shares...so what are you talking about?
Uhm, that's exactly what they are doing. Samba4 can (mostly) act as a domain controller in an AD environment. This even includes replicating to Windows AD controllers.
This is not a new thing. They have been working with samba for a couple of years at least.
Why is it that the Samba crew does all the work, including taking the case all the way through the courts, and shot down the appeals, and shooting down disinformation, and dealing with the anti-FOSS documentation NDAs, only for "JP" to give the headlines to M$?
The headline should reflect the content of the article and that is about the rapid headway that the Samba team is making. It's not the first time, nor even one of the first times, that the M$ developers have had to rely on the Samba team. Let's give credit where credit is due.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
http://linux.ittoolbox.com/documents/popular-q-and-a/how-to-set-up-a-samba-server-with-encrypted-passwords-2278
Samba has supported LM, NTLM, NTLM v2, and kerberos authentication for quite a long time (since v2.2 at least). Your gripe with "unencrypted passwords" is only valid if you want to use PAM for password authentication (which requires the password to be sent over the wire to be "applied" at the server side as if you typed it into the login prompt) and you are not using kerberos or LDAP, as you should be. This feature of windows is purposely disable in XP SP1 and greater because it is retarded and you don't know how to properly set up your linux box in a sane way.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
Did you not read the article you're posting about?
The bulk of the article is about precisely that. He's the lead dev on samba building an AD server, and talking about the wonderful level of support ms is (now) giving them.
He specifically mentioned that since they're the only ones working on an AD server replacement, at one of the 'plug fests' at MS' redmond campus, they were the only ones there to take advantage of it.
In addition, he mentions that the team on samba for building an AD server is short on developers, and is asking for help.
Microsoft is at embrace stage?
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
"and Andrew just had to leave Novel in a storm to push the idea"
No, that would be me, not Andrew Bartlett. Andrew has been happily working at Red Hat for many years now.
Jeremy.