Slashdot Mirror
Samba: Less Important Because Windows Is Less Important
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "Interview Bruce Byfield did with me after the Samba 4.0 release. Discusses interactions with Microsoft, the future of the code and project, and many other things."
Samba is a dance. Your confusing it with the term "Sambo" which is generally considered a racist term.
As the person who wrote that comment, I see no contradiction here. Samba 4.0 is needed because it updates everything adding Active Directory protocols. If for some reason all Windows system die tomorrow, Samba 4.0 is less important because the main use of it is Windows interoperability, actual samba is pretty useful for basic file sharing, and if you remove one of the uses of it to something, it become less important. Samba AD integration is not used for Linux system, it is just for Windows clients.
A project to follow for equivalent functionality of AD for pure Linux system is FreeIPA (still a lot of development ahead but the architecture is good)
It's all in how the server is configured, and if the client will pipeline requests.
I can easily saturate a gigabit network using modern Linux CIFSFS and Samba. Ensure you turn on pthread based aio on the server, and the client now issues multiple outstanding read/write requests.
SMB2 makes this easier as it does this by default even on Windows clients. Ensuring your server has the pthread-based aio is the key though (depending on server CPU availablilty - on low end systems some OEM's get more mileage by using zero-copy sendfile/recvfile instead).
Jeremy.
No, you're getting the history the wrong way around.
Samba was started in '92. The web wasn't on most companies radar until the late 90's.
Web and database on Linux came in the door opened by file servers :-).
Our original platform was SunOS (not even Solaris). When Samba started Linux was a toy, it didn't even have networking.
Jeremy.
No, I also know when it was first widely adopted. I was around and shepherded it through that remember. It really took off around 1994 when we had very wide use on SunOS and early Solaris use.
Wider Linux use really didn't start until about until 1996 or so. I remember tridge and I being amazed that making it work on Linux became more important than making it work on SunOS/Solaris/HPUX and other commercial UNIXes.
Jeremy.