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Samba 4 Enters Beta
rayk_sland writes "Progress is being made on the long awaited Samba 4 release. On Tuesday the Samba 4 team announced their first beta. Those of us who refuse to have a closed-source server at the core of our networks will be encouraged to see this milestone. Here are a few of the new features: 'Samba 4.0 beta supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join and domain logon operations with these clients. ... Samba 4.0 beta ships with two distinct file servers. We now use the file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by default. For pure file server work, the binaries users would expect from that series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd) continue to be available. Samba 4.0 also ships with the 'NTVFS' file server. This file server is what was used in all previous alpha releases of Samba 4.0, and is tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller. We continue to support this, not only to provide continuity to installations that have deployed it as part of an AD DC, but also as a running example of the NT-FSA architecture we expect to move smbd to in the longer term. ... Finally, a new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.'"
Way to school Microsoft on their own technology!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
While I'm certainly not a fan of Python, it's clear that they are leaving the high performance parts in C, and just using Python for scripting. Samba comes with a lot of tools that are not performance critical. For example, the smbtree utility needs to print a pretty tree of the current network from the results of a scan. If the scan is done by the core C code, there's no reason why you can't write the part that parses command-line options, prompts for passwords, and displays the output in an interpreted scripting language: even if it runs at 1% of the speed of C code, users won't notice the difference because almost all of the time will be spent in the code doing the I/O.
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So, I guess our organisation is one of those strange ones that persists with Samba as a domain controller.
To date, we have around 400 machines (desktops and laptops) running mainly XP (but some with Windows 7 and with a full migration in progress to Windows 7). We run two separate Samba 3 DCs to service out two domains. This setup has served us well for almost 10 years now.
The main challenge presented to someone trying to run Windows Vista or above on computers attached to a Samba3 domain controller is the lack of group policy options. With XP and below, you can use the 'ntconfig.pol' method to deploy policies to workstations on the domain. With Vista (and Windows 7) this method is no longer supported (and I don't just mean 'not officially supported, but works with some hacks'- it actually does.not.work.at.all). There are ways around this, and I have managed to find a workable solution that will allow us to run Windows 7 exclusively on a Samba3 domain and still have basically the same policy options available to us (this is achieved by working on the local computer policy for non-administrator users on the master image of our standard operating environment, combined with manually mapping samba groups to certain local groups on the workstation). This obviously isn't perfect, but it works for us and saves us a heck of a lot of money compared to the alternative, but I appreciate that what works for us won't work for everyone.
So for me, the major feature that Samba4 brings to the table is the group policy side of things (I know there's obviously a lot more to it than that, but at present that is the major thing that feels 'missing' from Samba3). Given that I see no reason why we won't end up sticking with Windows 7 until it ends extended support (in 8 years time) I see no reason why we won't be using Samba for quite some time.
Oh, and other than congratulate the Samba4 team in general, I have to give a personal congrats to Andrew Bartlett- a fellow Aussie and someone I have met personally. Thanks for all your hard work guys!
Intentional (or even incidental) inefficiency is never a positive thing when it comes to computing.
You seem to be under the impression that the most valuable resource in computing is clock cycles.
It's not, not even close.
The most valuable resource in computing is developer time. If writing in Python makes it quicker to develop code (it does, by orders of magnitude), then that is "efficient". I've been writing C programs since the late 80's and even I can see that Python is a productivity win.
I get sick of people that rant about "inefficiency" in clock cycles when here, in the real world, the inefficiencies with the greatest business impact are the ones that cost dev time. Devs are freaking expensive. A dev spending 2 weeks squeezing an extra 0.1% of performance out of a non-critical part of an app is a complete waste of time and money.
By all means, don't make a slow heap of crap (I don't think Samba is). And by all means, for code which is profiling very poorly, impacting the users and hurting the business, look for lower level optimisations.
But please, for everybody's sake, get some perspective on this issue. Just because parts of it are not written in C doesn't mean it's not efficient, because "efficient" covers a heck of a lot more than clock cycles, at least to people who actually have to run a business.
You are basically completely wrong about what the Samba team has done. All the daemons and such are still written in C (and/or C++). Did you really think that they would rewrite Samba from the ground up in an interpreted language?
All they have done is provide a scripting interface with bindings for Python. I don't know if the interface is generic enough to be used by other scripting languages, but that's irrelevant. The point is that you can script Samba, not that Samba is a script.
"You're a fool if you're telling the truth"
I'm sure he's not. He probably isn't outright lying, as in just making something up from scratch, but rather just suffering from Smartest Motherfucker in the Universe Syndrome, as many programmers do.
I see it all too often, programmers who seem to think they are god's gift to programming. They think they are WAY better than all the stupid "normal" programmers. They can't see why people have so many bugs, can't understand why development takes so long, can't understand why programmers don't "just make this happen," and so on.
Hence he probably did look at this and say "That'll be easy," not understanding the full complexity of implementing a really good AD server. The Samba team perhaps does understand and wasn't interested in playing around with someone who doesn't.