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Samba Turns 10 149

Posted by michael from the time-for-the-birthday-spanking dept.
abartlet writes: "Samba is celebrating its 10th birthday - initally released as Andrew Tridgell's humble 'Server 0.5' 10 long years ago. Tridge has made some notes on the past 10 years. And Samba is still going strong, becoming a cornerstone of the Linux community. Samba 3.0 is on its way and promises many new features, including for the first time support as a server in an Active Directory domain! But the biggest thanks goes to all those who have contributed code, bugs, testing, docs and feedback in general. We could not have come the last 10 years without you! -- Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team."
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Samba Turns 10 More

Samba Turns 10

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  • The begining (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john@lamar.gmail@com> on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:36AM (#2803619) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad to see the links to the USENET post along side the story.

    Story submitters: Try to do this every time. It's provides context, and you know we all want just click and not hunt it down.

    • Personally, I think the related story feature needs some work. If you haven't already figured out, it simply takes all the hyperlinks from the story and plops them into that table (and adds a couple "Also by.." links at the bottom). How this better then reading the actual story I don't see.

      I think there should be some extra fields for additional URLs on the story submittion page. For instance, the first mention of something on USENET would be an interesting related link for a lot of stories. However, there is no way of intergrating it into the story without it sticking out.

      Just a thought.

  • Rev-eng feats never cease to amaze me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by InterruptDescriptorT ( 531083 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:36AM (#2803621) Homepage
    Mad, mad props to these guys for 10 years of work on a protocol that you know Microsoft has worked long and hard to obfuscate through a lack of literature and, to some extent, probably in the arrangement of information in each payload.

    I also get the same feeling of awe when I see emulators for proprietary game systems released a very short time after the hardware is. For example, I spent some time writing a little game for the PlayStation to get my hands dirty, which I couldn't have done without the talents of the people who take the time to disassemble the ROMs, write the docs, produce the tools, and analyze the source code.

    If there were some way I could contribute monetarily to the Samba project or even some of my time (I have done some rev-eng stuff myself, mostly on undocumented Palm libraries), I would gladly do it. These guys deserve major kudos.
    • If there were some way I could contribute monetarily to the Samba project

      It's a well known fact that Andrew Tridgell, Samba's creator, accepts Pizza if you feel the urge to be generous. More details in the FAQ [samba.org]:

      Andrew doesn't askfor payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.

      Method 1: Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do, which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza one night, courtesy of someone in the US

      Method 2: Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany did this.

      Method 3: Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has from Germany :-)

      Method 4: Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture.

    • Mad, mad props to these guys for 10 years of work on a protocol that you know Microsoft has worked long and hard to obfuscate through a lack of literature and, to some extent, probably in the arrangement of information in each payload.

      Well, it is Microsoft's protocol... no one really has the God-given right to reverse engineer it! You're acting like you're pissed off about it, but remember, if it wasn't for MS, Samba wouldn't exist.

      • but remember, if it wasn't for MS, Samba wouldn't exist.

        hehehe well MS didn't write SMB, they took it from the lanmanager standard, I believe origionally written by a number of companies including IBM. Now you are partially correct in stating that SAMBA, the project wouldn't exist without MS, because there wouldn't have been the need, all the trials and tribulations that the team went through wouldn't have existed if MS hadn't co-opted the standard and done their typical embrace and extend on it.
      • Since the computers using the protocol are not Microsoft's, generally speaking, what right does Microsoft have to tell people what they can or cannot do with their property. That is like saying speaking French is reserved for the french.

        I believe reverse engineering is a God-given right. We received the right to do it when God gave us the ability to do it. Things like reverse engineering birds, atoms, etc. don't typically require a license.

        But I can understand how some might feel differently.
      • and if it wasn't for disease medicine wouldnt exist. what are you trying to say?

  • Not only under Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:37AM (#2803625) Journal
    I personnally use !SmbServer [ntlworld.com] under RiscOS [riscos.com] in order to efficiently share some files and printers with Linux and Windows machines.
    I just find it amazing and it IMHO has become a true protocol, much beyond its original Linux/Windows filesharing scope.
    Thanks !

  • Here Here (Score:2, Informative)

    by TRoLLaXoR ( 181585 )
    Kudos to the programmers.

    I used Samba 2 as the basis of my CS senior project. It was maervelous technology then, and it's only gotten better since.

    BTW, my senior project led to the use of Linux in our labs, as SMB was the only thing they really needed and had been looking at going to a *nix. My project deomnsrated that Linux with Samaba was the platform they needed to be on.

  • Samba is cool, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Make ( 95577 ) <max.kellermann@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:41AM (#2803652) Homepage
    .. and the team really does great work. But, the SMB protocol is a moving target, we had to see that several times in the past. The Samba team has always managed to readapt to new protocol versions. Everyone who has worked with Windows' network Neighborhood knows that SMB is also a really really broken protocol which only works with much patience.
    Wouldn't it be just better to invent a very new protocol, and provide clean clients for all major operating systems (Linux, BSD, windows 9x/NT, etc.). For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)
    I'm a bit thinking about efforts like Coda [cmu.edu] which is in the Linux kernel for years now, and there also exists a Windows client. Last time I checked there was no NT client which makes Coda practically useless at this stage.
    But I think a clean, well designed, secure and stable protocol would be a benefit for big company's networks and for home networks. I work as developer, but I often help our admins. It's a network of w2k, NT4, Linux and FreeBSD machines (about 60 computers). The Windows machines always suck... in many cases because SMB doesn't work as it should.

    • Re:Samba is cool, (Score:2, Informative)

      by More Trouble ( 211162 )
      You might try looking at OpenAFS [openafs.org]. It has many of the properties that you're wishing for above.
    • NFS has its problems, but securing NFS is something that many people are working on. Sun includes support for the sec= option on their NFS mounts; NFSv4 specs include various security protocols such as TLS, Kerb, SKPM..

      I don't know how fast a "Aftermarket" FS would take off in the IT market right now. Most people are locking into "static" mode - Nobody i know in TN is going to Windows XP in their enterprise, and people are just now beginning to move to Solaris 8 (Where they had systems at 2.6 previously.) I know some enterprise, especially those serious about maintaining the assured quality of their networks, are not going to install a 3rd party filesystem.. as part of the "holy trinity", a filesystem is something that most system engineers/admins, at least those I know, aren't going to take any risks on.

      I stand by my opinion that a Open Systems Consortium should be in charge of ensuring interoperability of operating systems.

      Just my $0.02 on Samba: *Pulls hair out*
      • > I don't know how fast a "Aftermarket" FS would take off in the IT market right now

        Huh?

        Veritas!
        • Quite established and well known, though. Recommended heavily by vendors, sun, oracle..

          I'm talking things such as Coda, etc.

          Personally, it was a godsend when i found out about WSFU.. eliminate samba in the environment - We're heavily reliant on cross-platform FS, heavily enough that we don't want to use an unsupported product. Services for Unix's Gateway for NFS is going to make me a happy man this year.
          • We're heavily reliant on cross-platform FS, heavily enough that we don't want to use an unsupported product.

            Unsupported by whom? Lots of people are happy to support Samba - if you pay them. It's also supported as part of the standard install on HP-UX now, and I think on some other Unix versions (not to mention almost all Linux vendors).

            ...I mean, come on. Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft supports SFU better than Red Hat supports Samba? The nature of the IT world is that any vendor will support their own products to whatever extent you desire, if you give them enough money. As will just about any third-party consultant. (Not that third-party consultants are much help for fixing bugs in SFU, due to its closed-source nature.)

            • Re:Samba is cool, (Score:3, Interesting)

              by AnalogBoy ( 51094 )
              In some organizations open source is considered taboo in some applications. Namely, those applications where there is a "Big name", albiet closed-source alternative with professional support, documented in an SLA or support agreement. Samba is not a product of RedHat, nor of HP. It is bundled software.

              And 3rd parties digging through code.. Im not sure I really like that idea in my environment. No thanks, but i'll stick with companies who's stock prices are well into the double-digits. This isn't an HP Shop, nor is linux allowed in our production environment. Therefore, as i elaborate on below, I'm unconcerned with the principle.

              [BEGIN Diatribe]
              This discussion boils down to Administration Philosophies, Open Source Zealotism and professionalism on both sides. It trancends into the metaphysical layers of the OSI Model. Financial and Political for me, Religious for most of slashdot. To my contemporaries and myself, open source software simply isnt worth the "risk". Our investors don't like it, we're past the buzzword stage, and you know, in the end, our purpose is to make money, not to stand on philosophy. The one Linux application we ran was a unmitigated disaster. While I know it doesnt speak for all OpenSource applications, it certainly puts forth the idea that when you put something into production, you want to make sure it is completely, totally, and undeniably supported for its entire lifepsan. Unix/OSS is not a way of life for me. It isn't the godhead of my existence - its not my calling. Its my job. I do my job, I take appropriate steps to ensure I'm the best I can be at what I do, and then I go home and attempt to improve myself in other ways. I like Windows. I like Unix. I accept the benefits of both. My employers like that. This is the reason i've gotten the jobs i've gotten. [Well, it obviously wasn't my charming personality]

              [END diatribe]
              • And 3rd parties digging through code.. Im not sure I really like that idea in my environment. No thanks, but i'll stick with companies who's stock prices are well into the double-digits.

                What exactly is wrong with 3rd parties digging through code? It's not like the original programmers are all going to be still working for the vendor you buy stuff from. For that matter, the software you buy may itself have been developed elsewhere and later purchased by your vendor - effectively making your vendor a "3rd party digging through code".

                If you pay a consultant enough money they should be more than happy to accept the burden of digging through someone else's code. If they turn out to be incompetent to maintain / fix that code, it's the same as if they turn out to be incompetent to do anything else you hire them for.

                And what do stock prices have to do with anything? You're saying your company never does professional business with any company whose stock price isn't well into the double digits? If you think the stability of a supplier is in doubt, you don't just walk away from the deal - you make sure you have backup suppliers. Why not the same with support contracts?

                This discussion boils down to Administration Philosophies, Open Source Zealotism and professionalism on both sides.

                You forgot "Closed Source Zealotism" - or "zealotry", I think the word is. You've said it yourself - for some shops open source is taboo, without there necessarily being any concrete rational reasons.

                Well, zealotry rarely hurts anyone other than the zealot (in a free society anyway). If a shop wishes to ignore the various advantages to using open-source solutions, hey, it's their budget.

          • Services for Unix's Gateway for NFS is going to make me a happy man this year.

            At least until you realize what colossal Microsoft single points of failure you've introduced into your environment with SFU and/or Microsoft DFS....

            (This may have changed with XP, I haven't checked, but I doubt it. It was definitely true with W2K.)
        • > Veritas!

          $$$$!!!

    • AFS is a really cool distributed filesystem and is used widely at many universities, I would like to see it used more in enterprise enviroments.

      A good free AFS implementation is Arla [stacken.kth.se]. Another one is, as a previous poster pointed out, OpenAFS [openafs.org]

    • This is actually a solid idea. A lot of the current possible replacements suffer a bit from being too sophisticated. In a small office enviroment having a distributed file system may not be needed. And the complexity makes it harder to write various clients that are rock solid stable. Expose mount points as shares, with some decent security and you've got 90% of the small office enviroment covered.

      KISS :)
    • I'm not going to argue wether another protocol should be developed but thats not what samba was designed to do. Samba was made to be an easy way to network windows and linux machines together using the bottleneck (internal fs support in windows). Linux is more then willing to support a variety of filesystems in a number of ways; windows doesn't nearly play as nice.

      Adding 'thin clients' and an entire new protocol is overkill for a problem that has been solved. There is nothing internally wrong with SMB, the problems often lies within the machines that are implementing them. Analogy time: lets say you came across a broken bridge that you needed to pass. You could either get a bunch of boards and nails and fix what is broken or you could create a catapult to leap over the gap. Clearly, the catapult gets the job done but opens up a whole other set of possible problems.
    • For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)

      While I couldn't agree more that something better is required, NFS is quite good (esp, v3 and v4).
      It's also important to remember (or learn) that authentication is NOT a function of NFS - that is done elsewhere. Most people just use garden-variety NIS, which is totally insecure, but ubiquitous and interoperable. NFS can operate securely (Kerberos or whatever else you want, it's pluggable), but most people choose not to, either out of laziness or ignorance. (Although Sun hasn't made secure operation as easy as it should have, either...)
  • Samba is a great piece of softare, don't get me wrong... but you're still emulating that suck ass non-routable smb protocol. Why not use something worth your time [redhat.com]? I'm sure some of you will say NetWare is dead, or NetWare sucks, but by saying that you are admitting you know nothing about NetWare and Novell's current product line.

    Give it a shot. You'll learn something, and find out it's a much better product than SMB and any M$ attempt at an NOS.
    • Novell was great in it's day. I've watched it mature from the old DOS versions to the 5.x flavor.

      That being said, integrating novell with a Windows NT network is a pain in the a$$. I currently support an application that runs on a Novell base(which in 3 weeks will be changed to a NT based network). The performance of this application is HORRIBLE. It constantly locks up our server, constantly(probably 2-3 times a day) locks up the print queue so I have to totally reboot the server.

      Samba has provided the perfect tool for me to integrate Unix environments seamlessly into our NT network, I wish I could say the same for Novell.

      *cringing at the thought of Zen*
      Jeremy
      • I've integrated numerous NetWare/NT networks. It just requires a skill set a lot of people just don't have these days. What app are you talking about? Why do you blame the NetWare for the app's misbehavior? ZenWorks, simply, kicks ASS. People mock what they don't (or won't) understand.
      • Novell was great in it's day. I've watched it mature from the old DOS versions to the 5.x flavor.

        That being said, integrating novell with a Windows NT network is a pain in the a$$. I currently support an application that runs on a Novell base(which in 3 weeks will be changed to a NT based network).
        Kind of funny in three respects: (a) Netware was never a DOS program, although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader. Netware's distant ancestors in the family tree would be more like Wang and System/1, not Seattle DOS or its descendents. (b) that said, Novell did basically invent workable MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 networking, for which Microsoft should be eternally grateful (we all know how Bill repays debts, though) (c) it is funny how the Microsoft meme generator leads even knowledgable people to say that "Netware is not compatible", when based on history, technology, and market share over the last 20 years it is NT which is not compatible with Netware. Deliberately so, of course, as anyone who remembers the nightmare of MS-Office 97 Service Pack 2 can attest.

        "Every mistake made with computers has been made three times: on mainframes, minis, and micros. Now we are building networks..."

        sPh

        • Netware is really nice (GroupWise, ZenWorks, BorderManager), but their client software can be a bitch (to both install and maintain). NDS is a blessing for network management. I hear that they are moving to a more 'universal' logon system in NW 6.x, which is totally IP based.

          Netware was never a DOS program, although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader.

          I always, however, found it interesting how you could still type down at a 5.1 server console prompt and exit to DOS!

        • Actually, netware was a dos program. Have you ever heard of Netware 86 (4.61B was the most popular version of this IIRC).

          You're server ran in non-dedicated mode, sharing your valuable 10 or 20 meg hard drive, but you could still run DOS apps on the same machine at the same time. Netware ran in 256K, so on a real beefy 512K machine, you had 256K left for MSDOS and your apps.

          I remember installing many a Netware 86 network -- seems to me that g/net has the most popular technology at the time (for our customers) don't remember details -- Timeframe was mid 80's

          Installing and configuring required significant technical knowledge. You actually linked your own drivers (the netware shell)

          Original netware was for Motorola 68K systems, and Novell sold the hardware. Eventually, Netware gave up on selling 68K hardware, as they could not compete with commodity PC's.

          IMO what made netware the best back then was small drivers. When dos was king, and a 256 XT was a hot machine, a driver than ran in 40K did file and printer sharing was way more important the the NetBios features from IBM/Microsoft that sucked down 80K of RAM.
        • although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader

          A friend of mine used to say, "DOS isn't really an operating system, but it's a damn fine program loader!" Pretty accurate, really.

          (Program loaders were common back in the early minicomputer days before many computers had the resources to afford luxuries like an OS.)
    • Non-routable??

      Samba (and SMB on Windows 9x/NT/2k for the record) works just fine over routed networks... you just have problems with browsing (better put a WINS somewhere if you have many non-technical users).

      Maybe you are confusing it with NetBEUI, that.... interesting.... thing that you may choose instead of TCP/IP as the layer below SMB services.
    • This isn't off topic you damn dorks, Slashdot RARELY speaks of NetWare, you guys are consumed by unix and M$. God forbid something else get thrown into the mix.
      • This isn't off topic you damn dorks, Slashdot RARELY speaks of NetWare, you guys are consumed by unix and M$. God forbid something else get thrown into the mix.
        Too true. And really odd also. There are many similiarities in the way Linux and Netware are handled in large organizations, particularly in difference in perceptions between the CxO level and the trenches level. Both are good technologies under attack from the Microsoft FUD/Marketing machine. Both have much to learn from each other.

        Yes, Novell had (and has) pricing and maketing problems - probably fatal. And yes, if your only experience with Netware is a 3.11 network set up by someone whose brother once took the Intro class, it can be horrendeous (sound familar? Linux set up by someone who has never used Unix before?).

        But the reflexive hatred to things Netware seen on Slasdot is pretty counterproductive.

        sPh

    • Although few people here know it, Novell's file sharing protocol, NCP, kicks serious butt. It is probably by far the best file-sharing protocol on the planet for serious production use. (there's some interesting stuff in the works, but at present development rates, it'll be years before its as robust and fast as NCP.

      The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.

      Case in point: NetWare won a shootout I conducted in 1994 to pick the best file-sharing system on which to deploy an emergency oil spill response system (be in full communication with Houston from anywhere in the world within 15 minutes of hitting the ground, with no computer guys for hundreds of miles!) The data link was over an Inmarsat satellite telephone - horrible latency with the bird in geosynchronous orbit. Everything was on PCs, and file sharing was mandatory to support Microsoft Mail and I included NetWare just for political reasons, expecting it to get creamed by one of the NFSes from NetManage, FTP Software, or Sun.

      Readers' Digest Version: NetWare smoked everyone so bad, I thought it must just be that all PC NFSs were bad - but the same thing happened with a Unix box over such a high latency link. I dug into it, talking with some of the Novel protocol jocks, and we identified several things that made it even faster, which they added in the next release. NetWare flat flew, NFS was unusable. I was sold on the superiority of NCP, and I think that's still true today.

      Good engineering still wins. As a longtime Unix bigot, I even developed a respect for NetWare, and how little server resources it needed to support a serious number of clients. NetWare is arguably not a real OS, but there's nothing faster for serving up files and printing, and sometimes, that's all the job is. (Sadly, I haven't worked with NetWare in several years. Its only problem back then was that it was an order of magnitude more difficult to manage than it had any right to be. Much like Linux in that regard...)
      • The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.
        I agree, and you haven't even mentioned NDS. But my question is, why doesn't Novell do something with that technology? It has been clear for five years that Microsoft was winning the FUD => mindshare => marketshare game. NT dominated networks had the inevitibility of an avalanche going downhill.

        Why didn't Novell recognize Microsoft's Maoist strategy by 1990 (enemy advances, we retreat...)? Many of us in the networking world did. Why didn't (and doesn't) Novell try to find some way to counterattack other than a head-on assult? Why not seriously open source some NDS code? Why not a real Netware client for Linux? Why not try to find some ground, any ground, to fight where Microsoft doesn't hold the heights? Why didn't Novell buy Netscape in 1995 when they had the cash (although given what they did to WordPerfect and SoftSolutions, maybe not!)?

        At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".

        sPh

        • At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".

          I'm afraid so, even Eric Schmidt couldn't turn the place around - he recently left as CEO of Netscape to be CEO of Google. For those that don't know, Eric is the brilliant former CTO of Sun who was the internal champion behind Java and many other cool things we now enjoy...
  • Since I came into doing lots of "computer stuff" from the outside, intially, when I first read about samba I basically said to myself "That's what I've been looking for!".

    And since then, I've networked by freakin' house - all because of samba and netatalk.

  • Sounds good. May have to check it out as a cheap file server. I wonder how it will compare to EMC though.
  • "the biggest thanks goes to all those who have contributed code, bugs," Yes, thank you to all those who contributed BUGS. -elmar-

  • World's Shortest Samba HOW-TO (Score:5, Informative)

    by hopeless case ( 49791 ) <christopherlmarshall@g m a il.com> on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:51AM (#2803715)
    Back in July, I wrote a 3 paragraph SAMBA HOW-TO over on www.rootprompt.org here [rootprompt.org], shortly after being appalled at the quality of yet another article supposed to show you how to get started with SAMBA.

    By the end of it, you can actually do something (gasp!) useful in some circumstances.

    Here's the text

    Samba how-to articles start off with how to write a configuration file so that your linux box can export a disk or print share that could be read by a windows client on the same network. I think this is a big mistake. The first thing you should show someone is the simplest possible command that acutaly makes something interesting happen. The time to explain the smb.conf file is when the next most interesting, complex experiment requires it, not before. There are a few very interesting and useful commands you can type that don't require that smb.conf even exists, let alone that the smbd and nmbd deamons are running.

    Without further adieu, here is the simplest command:

    smbclient -L server1 -U user%pass

    If you type this command into a bash prompt on a linux box, it will attempt to contact the machine with netbios name 'server1' on your network and get a list of all the disk and print shares it is exporting to the windows network neighborhood. It will do so using the username 'user' and password 'pass'. If you, as I do, run linux on your office workstation on a lan with a bunch of machines running windows, this is the first thing you would want to do.

    The next most interesting command looks like this:

    smbclient //server1/share1 -U user%pass

    This will attempt to connect you to the remote disk or print share 'share1' on the machine with netbios name 'server1'. If successful, you will be sitting at a command prompt at which you can use commands like cd, ls, get, and put, mkdir, rmdir, rm, ..., provided, of course, the username and password you used allow you such access to the remote share. If '//server/share1' is a print share, the command 'print file1' will send the local file 'file1' to the printer. If the printer is a postscript printer, you are in luck as most linux software prints to postscript files by default. If it is an ink jet printer, then you will need to use ghostscript to convert the postscript file to a file of the printer's format first, then send that file with smbclient.

    Now go have fun, y'all

    • I read it, and immediately tried it out on Linux, and it worked as advertised.

      Then I tried it on NetBSD - no suck luck. Whats worse, is that the Samba distribution with NetBSD says "smbclient is nothing to do with us, we dont want to hear about it, it sucks, piss off, etc" (OK I exaggerated a bit)

      I was very disappointed. I sold the concept of Linux to several clients on the strength of Samba, but NetBSD is SO much better. I just wish smbclient would work on it (and on Sparcs, and FreeBSD).

      Your HOWTO should mention that its LINUX only, and smbclient is Not Samba. (or else the NetBSD distro needs its README seriously rewritten.)

    • I still remember mine like it was yesterday.

      I was made the lead unix sysadmin about 20 days previous because I could remember some line commands and my supervisor didn't want to deal with it. (Yes this was in the Air Force)

      I then set up a 18 machine network with 2 servers and a raid controller. It took all of the 20 days but I thought I was hot shit back then. Then I was told that the NT machines sitting in the back had to be connected to the network. No Prob says I.

      10 hours later I was still shuffling between the DEC server and the NT Server and unable to do anything but ping.

      I remember fondly reading the install instructions with the hope inspiring line of "at this point you may want to take a break or get a beverage because this next part can be a little tricky" and thinking, "no way could it be that hard"

      After the second day I gave up and resorted to the unthinkable. I called the real admin up who had left the air force to complete his degree. The bastard couldn't remember AT ALL! Finally at the end of the second day (only 9 hrs this time) he and i finally got it working. Granted it took a conference call to the other admin guy that went to germany but the damn thing worked.

      Four years and a civilian job later and for some unknown reason I still recommend SAMBA to others.
  • No bashing here , but Samba validates Microsoft.

    Samba is awesome stuff a little harry for a late night conversion on a 300 gig W2K server at times but good stuff.

    Samba makes MS look that much better and more important, funny about every couple months you hear about MS planning to do something on their end to undo the work of Samba team, seems to me like a good bed fellow for Microsoft.

    Good Bad Ugly or None of the above , none of it matters when talking MS, fact is its here for the long haul, we have to connect to it, Ostritch networking dosent work in the real work (i.e. Its ms were just no going to connect and well stick our heads in the sand and act like it dosent exist) MS has been the bearer or butcher, whatever you think of many standards, Samba VALIDATES a few of those MS altered standards.
    • Samba works faster than Microsoft networking (there are tests showing this). I'll admit, Microsoft keeps pushing the envelope - releasing new stuff that barely works, and giving great new ideas to Samba's developers.

      And as far as making standards, a lot of the new ideas for a browser come from MS. Are they bad ideas? I think not. MS does a lot of things very badly, but their internet browser is top notch - it works better, and encorporates a lot of interesting features not found in other browsers. If they'd release it under Linux, I'd have no good reason to dual boot.
      • "And as far as making standards, a lot of the new ideas for a browser come from MS. Are they bad ideas? I think not. MS does a lot of things very badly, but their internet browser is top notch - it works better, and encorporates a lot of interesting features not found in other browsers. If they'd release it under Linux, I'd have no good reason to dual boot."

        You have to be kidding! Check this [theregister.co.uk] for some of the "features" thankfully not found in other browsers.
      • You guys make me want to puke.

        I'm seriously tired of hearing about "What A Great Browser IE Is".
        This story is supposed to be about "How Great Samba Is" for managing to survive despite the Empire's best efforts to break it.

        Once again, for the record:

        IE IS NOT A BROWSER. IE IS NOT "SOFTWARE".
        IE IS A CRIMINAL TOOL OF AN ANTICOMPETITIVE MONOPOLY. _NO_ONE_ SHOULD USE IE!!!

        Those Of Us Who Use Other Browsers(tm), especially on Other OSen(tm) are fed up with M$IE and its invasion of the Internet on bahalf of the Evil Empire(tm). We've now come to a point where we must actively hide the real identity of our browsers and state that we're using IE in order to gain admittance to an increasing number of web sites. These web sites then claim that, since no one but IE users hit their site, no one is using anything besides IE and they better soup up their websites with tons of M$ proprietary "content" that only works in IE. This has reached critical mass, and soon we'll _have_ to have M$ and IE in order to browse the web at all. As a Linux user, this bothers me.

        Kids, that isn't what the Internet is about, at all. The Internet is about open standards, interoperatbility, and easy communication between different systems and even hardware. IE's purpose is to break all that, and it is therefore evil.

        And I _REALLY_ don't care about "How Great IE Works", or "How Much Cool Innovation IE Has Brought To The Internet", or any of that.

        I'll probably get modded down for ragging on "The Internet's Greatest Browser", you moderators on crack obviously love to hear that crap, because this message's parent is at +3. I don't know where I ever got the idea that this was a Linux & Open-Source oriented forum. Now I guess it's a safe haven for Astroturfers....

        Go get a legitimate browser. Or go make a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Redmond where you can suck Bill Gates' ass. Or just go away.
        • IE is not a browser. IE is not "software".
          IE is a criminal tool of an anticompetitive monopoly.

          Believe it or not, Troll, it is possible for IE to be all three of the above.

          It also happens to be the best browser for Windows.

          Dinivin
          • On my 2K box I find that I use Opera 6 more than IE. There are places I have to use IE to get to (The MCP secure site at M$ to give an example) but Opera 6 is faster, handles multiple windows better and is free as in beer if you don't mind a little ad banner in your taskbar.

            On Linux I like Konqueror. It's IE the way IE should be. I suspect there are people sniffing around at Konqui's code up in Redmond now.

            This reminds me...I should download Opera for MacOS PPC right away. Netscape 4.08 and its quirks are getting old, and IE 4 for Mac committed seppuku a few weeks ago...it freezes when you try to open it.

            Yeah, I'm typing this from work on IE. But folks... http://www.opera.com/ . Just do it. Actually supporting these guys by buying the browser is a Very Good Thing (tm) and it's really not that expensive.

    • I think Samba exists not for the validation of Microsoft but for the encouragement of interaction among heterogeneous systems.

      Here are a couple of points to consider:

      • Microsoft's LAN Manager and their later implementations of SMB were not the only commercial implementations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but DEC PathWorks is an SMB implementation still under development and distribution by Compaq on OpenVMS.
      • Other proprietary file transfer protocols have been reverse-engineered and implemented in free software by other projects, including Novell and AppleTalk. Are the companies with the most popular implementations of the protocols also validated?

      I think overriding effect of Samba and other free software projects that implement proprietary protocols is to make operating sytems that incorporate these implementations (originally GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but now also several other UNIX variants) more attractive as newcomers to many previously entirely DEC or Microsoft shops, since they can interoperate seamlessly with legacy equipment. I would rather implement GNU/Linux with Samba in my datacenter than some proprietary OS that doesn't use Samba because I know Samba will be perpetually maintained and will always interoperate with any particular legacy system I am forced to use.

      Having worked for a major life sciences company in a biochemistry research facility, I know the need for interoperability with legacy systems. For example, we had a number of instruments called BetaRams which we the biochemistry IT team had to support because they would be expensive to replace, yet the company that manufactured these no longer existed. The only software available for these systems was only certified to work on particular versions of IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. We had to be able to allow the software to write data to network drives, and all we could run was LAN Manager or Novell. We needed to store the data on fault-tolerant, near-perfect-availability systems. So, we used VMS with PathWorks (SMB) - this decision was made long before Samba.

    • >> No bashing here , but Samba validates Microsoft.

      No it doesn't! There seems to be two groups of people here - those that embrace every attempt to get Linux to work with the rest of the world, and those that see anything like that as some sort of "betrayal" to the Linux community (to be fair, you haven't worded it that strongly, but I've seen it many times here).

      As an end user, and not a hacker, I cannot tell you how important it is to be able to have sharing of resources with others, regardless of their OS. It goes without saying that the majority of computing resources in the world are attached to MS-run machines. Anything that promotes access is a winner in my books. That the Samba team has accomplished this, to the degree they have, with a protocol as "crappy" as that, with MS doing everything they can to obfuscate matters, well, hats off to you people. Thank you very, very much.
      Would you prefer that they dismantle Samba and wait until enough Open Source resource sharing protocols are embraced by windows users? Don't hold your breath!

      Sincerely

      DT
      • >> Samba Validates Microsoft

        I would also just like to point out the, although many people dont like it, M$ is not going to be going away for a long long time. Samba is an easy to use/setup tool that allows the two interfaces to interact nicely. If anything, this has (and will continue to) help people to make an easy transition from OS to OS. I am not going to pretend that I understand a lot about the different sharing protocals...maybe the M$ one is a pain--but that is somewhat irrelevent. It is a sort of standard (sad as it may be) so whether we like it or not, we can't just ignore it.

        I would just like to say...thanks Samba...without you I might have abandoned my Linuxbox long ago.
    • This is a valid point and well worth considering.

      Regarding the "MS altered standards"... SMB itself has never been a standard. Microsoft's implementation of STD 19 (RFC 1001/1002) is very broken, however, and yes we do copy them on that. (I'm working on documenting [ubiqx.org] their implementation errors.) Others, like their Kerberos PAC manglement and the evil they've done to/with DCE/RPC... again, this is a valid perspective and one that has not been lost on us.

      On the plus side, by doing the work we do we expose some of these problems, and hopefully work toward raising awareness.

      Thanks.

      Chris Hertel -)-----
      Samba Team

  • Golden Pizza Award (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @10:59AM (#2803750) Homepage
    ...For best product enabling some semblance of competition in an office workplace environment, and for all their efforts going up against a very well funded vendor lock-in conspiracy. A great example of real software technology competition on it's own merits w/o the heavy reliance on marketing and legal manouvering.
  • It is actually possible as it stands to get Samba to at least authenticate to an AD server (I'm guessing due to backward-compatible features making the AD DC act more like an NT4.0 DC); we're doing it here. However, there's probably a load of other AD features that aren't supported in 2.2, so best of luck on improving what is already a very good product!

  • BDC? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lavaforge ( 245529 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @11:05AM (#2803772)
    First off, kudos to the samba team for developing a product that works well and raises Microsoft's ire.

    Does anyone know if future versions of Samba will be able to function as a backup domain controller in an NT4 domain? That right there would be a huge boon for companies that don't want to spend MS License costs, but need failover protection.

    Unfortunately, I'm still a novice programmer, and that sort of thing is well above my abilities. Oh well, maybe one day.

  • 2003 Challenges for SAMBA team (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hackus ( 159037 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @11:27AM (#2803870) Homepage
    Unfortunately, the SAMBA team has a much bigger challenge on the horizon.

    Microsoft is just biding thier time and waiting for the ultimate outcome of the Napster and other laws that forbid fair use, reverse engineering, etc.

    My personal prediction for 2002-2003 year is that SAMBA will end up in the fryin pan with a letter from Microsoft's cronies/lawyers telling them they are in violation of and that they must cease operations immediately.

    Same goes for a lot of other open source projects.

    I think the Open Source community should preempt the money establishment and prepare for the day when projects and servers can distribute free software without being so centralized as they are today. (i.e. SourceForge).

    I won't get into what I think the rammifications are should SourceForge ever becomes seriously compromised. (i.e. a new project Opens up and voila', the source code to Windows 2000 is downloadable....)

    The past year has been the worst year of patents, MULA, EULA, RIAA and DMCA crap I have ever seen.

    More shananigans no doubt will be the rule of thumb for 2003, but only this time, there won't be so much confusion, as recent ignorant courts have made some very very dangerous precedents.

    Microsoft is just waiting for enough of them to accumulate before they hit the Open Source community with 2 Billion dollars funding a horde of lawyers that will forever do away with critical key software the OpenSource community relies on. (i.e. SAMBA, Linux Kernel, X-Windows, etc.)

    It very well maybe that Europe will see the rebirth of Open Source as such crap doesn't go over very easily in Europe. (i.e. the ludicrous idea of software patents.)

    • Re:2003 Challenges for SAMBA team (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-homeNO@SPAMcobol2java.com> on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @11:49AM (#2803995) Homepage
      Not so fast,

      Yes, the samba people do reverse engineer lots of part in SMB, AD etc, but MS knows about it, MS got even a link to Samba on their web pages, and there is even a person (forgot his name) who works at Microsoft (they call him "our man at MS")...

      Microsoft actually profiting from this move - sure, they'll loosing a bit on server selling if you use Linux as a PDC, but you still need NT/2K for BDC stuff, you're also using Exchange server which needs licenses (and connected to PDC/BDC), and the biggest part - those servers service the Windows workstations - which is the big revenue to MS...

      So if MS wanted to sue the SAMBA people - they would have sued them long time ago (see how fast they sued Lindows for a small thing as the name)..
      • Microsoft actually profiting from this move - sure, they'll loosing a bit on server selling if you use Linux as a PDC, but you still need NT/2K for BDC stuff, you're also using Exchange server which needs licenses (and connected to PDC/BDC), and the biggest part - those servers service the Windows workstations - which is the big revenue to MS...

        Once Samba becomes a full-fledged server/client piece, with PDC/BDC et all, you would be able to have a full network with Linux stations and servers running Samba.

        Why use Samba for Linux, if most are Linux anyway? For those couple of MS workstations/servers you still have. It would be great for migrating from MS to Linux. First, slowly replace the servers with Samba stations, then slowly replace the workstations. MS wouldn't like it if Samba was widely being used as a Windows-to-Linux migration tool.
      • Trademarks are different. There, you _have_ to sue, or lose it. You can ignore copyright violations and still retain the copyright.
  • Samba is one of the best examples of systems integration I ever seen. They tried to bring together two opposite sides that didn't seem to be interested to be together and did a terrific job.

    Samba should be at the next Carnival in Rio, guys!!
  • although I am personally rather new to Linux and Samba I found it extremely easy to setup, reliable in everyday work, and incredible stable.
    I use it in our Backyard-Network here in Munich, where a friend/neighbour and I share a single DSL Connection.
    It runs really fast, even on my old CF-41 Notebook, and serves many Simpsons, Futurama or Buffy Episodes every day...now for nearly 100 days... [213.196.88.162]

    Happy Birthday Samba!!!

    Lispy
  • In 1996 I decided to use samba to implement a non-mission critical function of our flagship product.

    We started with samba 1.9 and now are installing 2.21 with neww customers. Of all the versions, 2.21 was the biggest performance improvement - making shares "feel" like local drives - and running better than our PDC's shares.

    Although it's been a pain at times, it's well worth the trouble.

    We now have hundreds of people who realize that you don't need to buy a NT Server to have centralized file and print sharing.
  • YAMTP(yet another me too! post). I've been a fan of Samba and have used it for 4 years now. I'll never forget the argument I got into with Jeremy Allison where I (mistakenly) claimed that Microsoft had no hidden API's. Of course, he promptly proved me to be wrong.

    Come to think of it, I need to add him to my 'fans' list. Good job, guys.

  • Cornerstone? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Xunker ( 6905 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2002 @12:26PM (#2804159) Homepage Journal
    "...becoming a cornerstone of the Linux community."

    This counts as sort of amusing as Samba was originally written for Trigells' DEC system, and I doubt he even expected to ever get off his DEC, let along be ported to a dozen other systems and become one of the highest profile Free Software projects in use.

  • Giving credit (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Samba has long gotten far less credit for the server-side success of Linux than it deserved, IMO. In a world that where Windows still has a near-total desktop monopoly, Linux would get almost nowhere on non-'net servers without Samba.

    So lets have a round of applause for the Samba developers.

  • Isn't this article two days early?

    Since the initial announcement on USENET was 1992-01-10 see here [google.com]. And todays date is 2002-01-08. So isn't it more right to say that Samba's 10th birthday 2002-01-10? Or am I missing something?

    • Everybody knows there are 365 days in a year, so the 10-year anniversary must have been 2002-01-07, 3650 days after the 1992-01-10 announcement. :-)

  • I have said this many times before and many people agree with me on this. All Samba (and Linux) needs is a simple way of graphically browsing and right-clicking, then choosing a menu option of share. It also needs to become more incorporated into the operating system to allow one single listing of user accounts, instead of one list for Samba, one list for the OS.

    This will do wonders for opening up Linux to places that it currently is unable to get into. I am not saying that those other lists need to go away, because there are plenty of times when having those additional, seperate, user lists can be beneficial to security.

    Will having a powerful feature like that seriously hinder the stability and security of Linux? I personally believe that that wouldn't be an issue, if implemented properly.

    Until that day, unfortunately, Linux will remain a backroom OS only usable by those that enjoy learning and battling with dificult to follow configuration files. I happen to enjoy that, but I cannot count the number of times that a Samba config gave me minor issues with a single config line.

    The news that I really want to hear is someone proclaiming that they have built a Linux distro that allows you to easily setup the system with one single user listing and the ability to configure network shares very similiar to how you can do so under Windows.

    I know, it is a blasphemous thing to say. However, it is the truth. It will help Linux grow in market share, usability and seriously help Linux gain more ground over Windows.

    If I had the time, I would work on it myself. I just don't have the time and energy for such an ambitous project. Please,take this idea and run with it.

    --
    .sig seperator
    --

    • HOW IS THIS FLAMEBAIT? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Calling the above post flamebait is like calling someone that watched a football game a murderer.

      It is a simple, inteligent response that has excellent merit.

      What kind of moderator are you anyway?

  • smbfs (Score:2)

    by Satai ( 111172 )
    One of the more interesting applications of the SMB protocol has, in my experience, been the smbfs part of FreeBSD. It's not very well known, but it's incredible easy to use - nowadays it's even part of the base system; no port needed.

    One of my machines boots into both BSD and windows; the other one serves as a Samba server so that I can share media and data. Using smbfs, I was able to put a line into /etc/fstab that mounted all my SMB shares at bootup. Then I was able to share JPilot information, .vimrc's and so forth.

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