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Veritas Announces Samba Support On Solaris

Posted by Hemos on from the a-victory-for-open-source dept.

Jeremy Allison - Samba Team writes "Generic "Open Source" scores another success news. In a press release at their web site, Vertias has announced that they'll be shipping a fully supported Samba on Solaris as part of their "VERITAS File Server Edition" product. " As always, my hat's off to the Samba Team.

29 comments

  1. The enemy of my enemy is my friend by sloth+jr · · Score: 1

    Anything that can dilute MS' stranglehold on IS is a good thing, for Sun, for Linux, for all Unixdom.

  2. Open-source not supported? Ha! by 198348726583297634 · · Score: 1

    When more companies start doing this, it's just one more nail in the coffin of all those who oppose open source on stupid grounds. (there are legitimate reasons not to support it, of course- but the 'no-support' one isn't of them.)

  3. Fully supported Samba by JimStoner · · Score: 1

    I always thought that ballroom dancing trousers looked tight.

    1. Re:Fully supported Samba by geocajun · · Score: 1

      are you talking about rumba? samba is a tool that makes your unix server look like an NT server to the client.. rumba is a mainframe interface tool

    2. Re:Fully supported Samba by JimStoner · · Score: 1

      No.

  4. Veritas by Signal+11 · · Score: 4
    Just a quickie summary of Veritas:

    In short, Veritas is a very commonly-used filesystem in the workplace - there's not many Solaris sysadmins that haven't heard of it. It is mainly used for high performance filesystems - raid0, raid5... the big boys.

    Since samba is supported by these guys now, it's a given that very high performance samba servers are going to enter the marketplace soon. What does this mean for Microsoft? Bad news. You can now replace your 50+ NT servers with a single solaris box.. and get better performance to boot. Stability, speed, reliability... everything a unix wookie needs in his holy war against the evil empire.

    --

    1. Re:Veritas by maugt · · Score: 1

      There already are high performance CIFS (for that is what Samba uses) file systems out there. If people were to use dedicated optimized boxes (such as Network Appliance's filers) to serve the data rather than using an expensive SUN server that didn't perform as well, you wouldn't have the problem in the first place ;-)

    2. Re:Veritas by ryanr · · Score: 1

      We use Vertias on our Sun E10000. We had some conflicts with a commercial SMB product, and couldn't use it. (For whatever reason, the SysAdmins didn't care for my suggestion to use Samba.)

      So, this looks like a very welcome addition, and it looks like I get my way. :)

    3. Re: Veritas by Chalst · · Score: 1

      I agree. It looks as if Microsoft's dominance into the next decade turns on the acceptance of windows 2000 as a server platform. Microsfot servers look badly squeezed: if you want cheap, innovation friendly servers, you can't beat Linux, whilst if you are willing to pay for rock solid, top performance, Solaris grand slams Microsoft.

      The months following the full release of W2000 should be very interesting to watch. It could so easily be an OS/2 like disaster.

    4. Re:Veritas by Signal+11 · · Score: 3
      You bring up a good point, but I would like to point out that regardless of what you or I think - the big UNIX shops are Solaris, not linux. Veritas has been in those shops for a long time, and both management and the techies are used to it. That adds up to a wide acceptance in these shops - esp. considering that most every business has a few windows systems out there that need file and print services.

      And though I am loathe to admit it... the Linux filesystem is woefully inadequate for large servers. It works very nicely for SOHO and small workgroups.. but it has too many performance issues to be considered for large servers. ( To illustrate, create an 800mb file on the ext2 fs. Now go ahead and delete it. Can you see the smoke coming out of your HDD yet? ) As always, work is being done to address this... but right now the support isn't there.

      --

    5. Re:Veritas by Doug+McNaught · · Score: 1
      ( To illustrate, create an 800mb file on the ext2 fs. Now go ahead and delete it. Can you see the smoke coming out of your HDD yet? ) As always, work is being done to address this... but right now the support isn't there.

      I found this out the hard way when I was ripping lots of mp3's from my CD collection. There was a discussion about it on linux-kernel, with the suggested workaround of using 4K or 8K blocks when you make the filesystem, instead of the default 1K. It makes a huge difference, much more than a factor of 4 or 8 (I think due to indirection that unlink() is O(n^2) in the number of blocks, which would explain the improvement).

      So if you have a disk that you know will store very large files, be sure to use mke2fs -b 4096 or better.

      Not a solution, but a darn good workaround...

      -Doug

  5. Re:Great! Now how about Samba on s/390s? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can download Mortice Kern's port of Samba to OMVS here.

  6. Not offtopic! Funny! by Amphigory · · Score: 2

    "Fully supported samba", where samba is a dance. So, ballroom dance trousers looked tight = support clothing. Get it?

    I apologize for my uncultured compatriots who simply don't understand.

    --
    -- Slashdot sucks.
    1. Re:Not offtopic! Funny! by JimStoner · · Score: 1
      Thanks ...At least someone got it *laughs*.

      Is humour being dumbed down just like everything else? Lets be honest Friends is not exactly ground-breaking.

      ...and, before you say it, humour is spelt correctly! Unless you look it up in an American dictionary that is, like that modern lexicon, Encarta by Microsoft.

  7. Veritas and Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Veritas is reportedly VERY interested in Linux, and there are many Linux advocates inside Veritas. Expect to see more in the future. They've got some pretty cool technology, and since their recent merger, LOTS of neat apps - many of which admittedly come from NT, and many of those are going to be taking on a stronger cross-platform focus.

  8. Re:..huh? by orev · · Score: 1

    This is not a Sun product, it's Veritas. Veritas makes products that run on Solaris. This would be a product by Veritas, for Solaris.

  9. ..huh? by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 1

    This is a bit of a turn-around from the article just previous to it on Slashdot, don't you think? What I mean to say is, is Sun having a good Samba port a good thing for the Linux community?

  10. Great! Now how about Samba on s/390s? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is getting nicer and nicer. This may sound silly, but does anyone know if there is a port to OS/390 and OS/400 at IBM underway. That sounds like a killer app -- supporting everything out there off mainframes and minis. I do like UNIX, but my heart is still with MVS. I can't run it at home, of course, but it is beautiful. On a less on-topic point (and forgive my new guy ignorance -- I just got Debian 2.0 to install last months and have only just got CDE working properly), but does anyone know how to bind processes to specific processors on Linux (is there an FM I can R?)?

    1. Re:Great! Now how about Samba on s/390s? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Almost everything has downsides. Sometimes the downsides are worth the trouble. MVS is like that. Just like UNIX, the payoff for learning the minutia just goes on and on. I think that it is a real pity that IBM never tried to make MVS popular in any less expensive way -- like giving mainframes to schools the same way that they give away RS6000s. I love UNIX, and I respect it for its purity, the way it seems to be "just right" like a race car is just right. UNIX really adheres to that maxim (an early aviator speaking on engineering said this -- St. Euxpre? I am sorry but the name escapes me and it shouldn't, give that I fly) that something is finished when there is nothing left to take away. MVS is like that, but it is the difference between a Can-Am car (or one of the Killer Bs, for the youngsters)(that would be something like a Porche 959) and a 747. Or a nice little Golf tdi and a Peterbilt with a 16 liter Cummins turbosdeisel (that still gets 6mpg hauling 80,000 pounds!).

    2. Re:Great! Now how about Samba on s/390s? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks.

    3. Re:Great! Now how about Samba on s/390s? by mikfer · · Score: 1

      Yes, my brother. MVS still is the sweetest.

  11. A Stupid Comment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...but am I the only one who has picked up the notion that this is actually ominous -- from reading the immediately preceding (or next) article on Slashdot, about how Sun is using Linux as a pawn...?

    -- Anonymous Coward

  12. Cool... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It is always nice to see more and more companies supporting open source software... My hats off to these guys as well! :-) - Fleck

  13. Veritas supporting SAMBA is good by poopie · · Score: 2

    ... now all we need is VxFS and VxVM for LINUX.
    (oh yeah, and raw devices ;)

    anyway... This is good because a lot of large shops won't consider downloading sourcecode and compiling it on their MISSION CRITICAL production servers (or.. their "sysadmins" are merely operators who don't feel comfortable building source "you mean you have to pay extra for the compiler??" ;)

    so, this is good for linux in the following way:

    -- Samba gains credibility as a file serving solution
    -- samba development progresses
    -- Large customers get their commercial support from a vendor they're already doing business with
    -- selling samba on linux to management gets *much* easier (hey, veritas is using it, and their customers are running it on large Sun servers!)

    So, smile, and enjoy the smell of the Windows empire slowly burning to the ground.

    1. Re:Veritas supporting SAMBA is good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Veritas VxVM is the cat's meow.

      Pull up a graphical view of your partitions and meta-devices.

      Color them according to I/O rate in realtime.

      Two busy partitions on one disk? No problem - drag and drop one onto a less busy one!

  14. Why can't you run it at home? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have two fairly new S/390s and the matching drive arrays in my garage. Of course I've been diving dumpsters and doing what I call 'pimping' junk off of companies for years now, it still doesn't matter. It's out there and it's not hard to get... for free even.

    1. Re:Why can't you run it at home? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You, Sir, are a god. Congradulations. I have been trying to get something air-cooled for several years now and I have had no luck at all. How did you do it? Really -- I would love to know! The media is no big deal, but the hardware always has been.

  15. Samba license by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Well, once again we have proof that the GPL discourages commercial use of software. If only Samba was under a BSD style license, maybe Veritas would have been able to use it.

    1. Re:Samba license by McKing · · Score: 1

      Umm, hello? Did you actually read the body of the article?

      --
      If only "common" sense was actually that common...