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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.
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.