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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."
Earlier today I read a man complaining to Slashdot that Linux only has two data sharing options "off" and "configure 400 settings." He was answerred with a post of "just use Samba."
And then, this.
Samba is a dance. Your confusing it with the term "Sambo" which is generally considered a racist term.
Samba is absolutely still important. We just take SAMBA for granted now more than ever because it is pre-installed everywhere in almost every appliance. For example buy a $20 internet 'router' from Best Buy that can share a connected USB drive over a LAN and it probably uses SAMBA for functionality.
I use Samba at home for my media file shares, and probably still would have even if Windows interoperability wasn't an issue, it's widely supported by most non-Windows OSes (except iOS, the first OS where you need to pay to add on a Samba client. Progress!)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And it still probably won't come with an offer for source code (sigh :-).
Jeremy.
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.
You say this while I've got a power point presentation open about our new "lets put everyone on Virtual machines and have them remote in via linux terminals!" Something I never thought I'd see. It's not going to happen tomorrow but we're never going to Windows 8 or above. That's relatively clear. Microsoft nailed their own coffin shut.
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.