Samba Developer Interviewed on National TV

Samba developer and LinuxCare employee, Andrew Tridgell, was interviewed on Australian ABC's influential 7:30 Report national current affairs program. "All we need to do is fire up a 98 box and do a domain log-on," Tridge said. Thanks to Paul "Rusty" Russell for finding this.

Comments

Working away from work, the only way to work.

[WNight]

I found the article interesting. Not because of who it interviewed, or where he lived, but because of the trend it shows.

Admittedly, I see more of the work from home because I do medium-term consulting, but the companies I've worked for have been slowly moving the technical staff home, except for network admins and other people who need to be on hand to deal with phsyical problems.

It can help an Australian get a job in North America, and it can help a N.A. worker get a job without having to commute. It's a great situation and a great equalizer. Not only can Australian workers do this, but workers from very poor countries could too. All it would take is a reasonably priced connection and an office which just rents deskspace (and connectivity) to employees, all of whom work in different companies and countries around the world.

This won't work for some companies who rely on having employees around for creative tasks, such as having the art staff work closely together, but for programmers working on modules of a larger program... they're probably happier never having to meet the art staff. :)

Any company wanting to remain competetive is going to have to explore this, not only does it give them the largest selection of workers, but it also lowers costs (no office space needed, etc) but it also gives the employee an effective raise (Imagine your current salary but without transportation expenses and the cost of eating out...)

well, if they care...

[Hobbex]

If australia is so concerned about loosing their technology-apt youth, maybe they should interview them about what sort of laws will scare them off. Internet censorship might have an insie-tinsie little effect on peoples attitudes for example...

Our Samba developer better hope that the code is free from any of those aweful harmful magic words that transform nice pretty kids into hateful massmurderers.

Also, I'm not a drooling fang-toothed windows hater (I just don't use if I don't have to) but exactly are Linuxcare firing up 98 boxes for?


-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Samba's Enterprise-Readiness

[MenTaLguY]

As someone who is responsible for supporting Samba deployments in a Fortune 500 company, I feel somewhat qualified to speak to the issue of "enterprise readiness".

Samba seems to have a real problem with encrypted passwords. They say that they HAVE to be used in some configs and CAN'T be used in others.

This is an unfortunate consequence of the laws of mathematics. Both NT and Unix use irreversible hash algorithms to "encrypt" passwords, but they use different ones. There is simply no way to "convert" an NT password hash into a UNIX password hash, or vice-versa. I'm sorry, but not even Microsoft can produce code that can bypass the laws of mathematics (although some days non-deterministic behavior has you wondering...)

In practice, this is not a serious limitation. At work, the Samba servers are members of a resource domain and authenticate against NT PDCs. It's also possible to replace them with Samba PDCs -- if you don't insist on using UNIX-hashed passwords for Samba authentication, encrypted passwords will work fine. Samba's emerging LDAP functionality also raises the possiblity of directly sharing account databases between the NT and Unix sides.

If you insist on using a Unix-style password database for Samba authentication, then you will not be able to use encrypted passwords on the wire. That is, however, the only limitation. All other configurations can use encrypted passwords.

The only circumstances under which you cannot use plaintext passwords are when dealing with Win98 or NT4SP3+, and that's Microsoft's doing, as they disabled negotation of plaintext passwords.

Why is it MS products can connect to anything but Samba has problems.

For values of "anything" that equal MS products?

Samba also has real problems with oplocks.

The only real limitation on oplocks in Samba deals with situations where you can have both Unix and NT users accessing the data simultaneously, if the particular Unix flavor does not itself support oplocks. Under those circumstances, you'll need to turn oplocks off to avoid potential data corruption.

Note that this is due to an architectural limitation of certain Unix flavors, not of Samba itself. On Unices that support oplocks (i.e. IRIX), oplocks are safe because Samba uses the OS's native oplock facilities.

They need to fix it before it is enterprise ready.

I'd say it's enterprise-ready now, for pretty much everything but PDC/BDC functionality. Stop with the FUD.

Why Andrew fires up 98 for LinuxCare

[tilly]

Andrew is the head of the Samba project, which is what allows other operating systems to play with the Microsoft file-sharing system. Therefore he really does need to have Windows up to work on Linux - because what he is working on is getting Linux to do a better job of talking to Windows.

In particular I he might be firing up Windows 98 because Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that the Samba developers had been concentrating on NT to come up with some embarassing benchmarks (*cough* Mindcraft *cough*). Also 95/95 is a far faster client for NT than NT is, and I bet he wants to know what makes the difference.

Cheers,
Ben