Samba 4 Technology Preview Released

daria42 writes "Samba creator Andrew Tridgell has officially released a technology preview of Samba 4 at the Linux.conf.au conference in New Zealand, ending a three-year wait for users. But wait before upgrading those servers. 'It may eat your cat,' says the Samba team in a statement, 'but is far more likely to choose to munch on your password database.'" From the article: "'Samba 4 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join and domain logon operations with these clients,' the group said in a statement on its Web site, noting this feature was 'the main emphasis' for the new software."

Simba was the cat, Samba is the dance

[Anonymous Coward]

Simba was the cat, Samba is the dance

What is this samba you speak of?

[squoozer]

Since discovering the joys of NFS I've not looked back (yes I do know what samba is and I run a samba server). Compared to Samba, NFS is almost too simple and reliable. Give me my complixity and unreliablity back!

Re:Just Work (TM)

[zerocool^]

That's exactly what I thought. Samba is for network shares in a relatively simple environment. Authentication via Windows domain could be accomplished with more stability with Kerbeos / LDAP. It's what we do with our lab machines.

And I would much prefer to use samba to share out my oggs and mp3s without needing a volcano and a goat.

~Will

Re:What is this samba you speak of?

[BenjyD]

I'm not a sysadmin, but I never got how NFS prevented a user plugging a computer which they have root access on into the network, mounting a common NFS mount, "su"ing to somebody's UID and then deleting their files. AFAICS, SMB handles this by requiring credentials of some kind from the computer. Can anyone explain this?

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[node 3]

There's a very interesting quote at the end of that article:

"Let's be honest, we don't really care about selling it, we're just having fun doing it. So long as we're having fun and we're working on problems that interest us then other people can worry about market share and how you sell it to the government or whoever, because that's the stuff that interests them."

If you think about it for a minute, if you consider how Open Source functions, where people work on the things that interest them, the "suits" that are often derided from some quarters are just filling a non-technical need in the Open Source community. There are often calls for people to test, write manuals, and create artwork as something they can do if they aren't programmers, but perhaps "marketing, sales, build corporations" are things that also should be added to that list?

To clarify, I'm certainly not talking about the CherryOS-style GPL-theives, but honest and earnest businesspeople (even though their motives may be primarily cash, they still must abide by proper Open Source rules).

Anyway, thought it was interesting.

Re:Just Work (TM)

[Pecisk]

What he meant there should be definetly easy way to turn it on, of course, with warning that some security problems could arise. AFAIK, KDE and GNOME has both easy ways to create shares for now, but there is no way to configure SAMBA for just several default scenarios which could be - anonymous read-only, anonymous read-write, user-based read-only, user-based read-write, custom. Default could be user-based read-only. Or something like that.

For example, OS X Tiger server uses SAMBA for Windows support. Any mangling with configuration goes trough Server Admin GUI (you can mess with configuration file too), but any changes gets written back to standard smb.conf.

It could be very good and nice present for common crowd.

NFS and Samba

[DrYak]

You know, the big problem is, that the PHB [wikipedia.org]s that are sitting at the head of big corps around have never heard of NFS. They've only seen the niiiiiice Shiiiiiinny PowerPoint presentation in Microsoft booths in big expos. And then, they have made their company to pay a lot for an over-priced non-standart Microsoft LDAP/Kerberos/SMB bastard (a.k.a. Active Domain) and are now knee deep into a locked-in solution from which there's no other out except paying an even higher price for the next even worse microsoft product.

This is the crowd that is targeted by Samba 4 :
- those who are SMB/CIFS dependant beyond repair, but need an alternate and opensource solution to Microsoft.

Of course, for the other guys out there, who can see differences between a real OS and a nice promises in a PowerPoint, there are other protocols to start with (like NFS).

Re:But as an Active Directory replacement?

[gentimjs]

Yes, active directory is decent - if you only ever want windows clients. I confess that Ive got a samba3 server (Gentooooooo) as "full" member of our W2K ActiveDirectory - and even got the permissions synced up enough so that users can right-click files and play with permissions through the gui on the doze client. HOWEVER this setup took weeks of tweakage, involved a dozen or so actual software packages, and required violating some published microsoft specs on how AD (supposedly...) works. If samba4 gives me this without the BS, I'm happy. If samba4 lets me replace my domain controller and have the existing doze infrastructure not notice, I'm even more happy.

Which version of Active Directory?

[j-cloth]

This all sounds great, but will it work when(if) Vista comes out? Previously, I had samba setups running beautifully on Win2K networks. Then 2003 came out and it messed it all up. Eventually Samba (and supporting docs) caught up and 2003 now works reasonably well. So will Samba 4 come out with great support for 2003 then break as soon as Vista is released?

Re:Which version of Active Directory?

[Anonymous Coward]

The weblog [livejournal.com] linked from the article explains that Windows Vista will be using a new protocol, SMB2. Apparently the Samba team have already reverse engineered this and its in the technology preview! Impressive if you ask me.

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[DocLandolt]

"even though their motives may be primarily cash, they still must abide by proper Open Source rules"

Just out of curiosity, what are these? Not 'all' rules -- but does anybody know (or offer wild speculation on) what happens when open source and fat wads of cash collide?

Easy Transition? Excellent.

[foo fighter]

This is going to be fantastic for consultants when Win2K Server support ends.

Many companies are not going to want something that isn't supported and will be looking where they should transition. Savvy consultants can propose a migration to Samba which could provide higher margins than reselling Microsoft solutions -- especially if they aren't a close partner of Microsoft -- and they will be able to fix problems and customize the solution themselves without having to point fingers (they still can, they just don't have to).

This quote from the article gets me all warm and tingly inside:
"Tridge demonstrated sucking the life out a Windows 2003 PDC [primary domain controller] in one click, importing all its user and machine information using SWAT."
"He then restarted [domain server] BIND on his Samba 4 server, changed the server role to PDC ... shut down the Windows PDC and then logged into the domain with an XP client using the new Samba 4 server as the PDC."

Re:Just Work (TM)

[CastrTroy]

I think the problem is that even if you tell samba that you want to make folders read/write anonymous, it still doesn't always work. This is because the anonymous user that samba uses also has to have access to those folders and files for read/write access. If it doesn't, then the system won't let samba access it, no matter how much it's config files tell it it should be able to. If you want a samba share that you can access anonymously from any computer, make a Fat32 partition, mount it read/write/execute all, and share that. The problem is that you can't share the stuff in your home folder, while still maintaining permissions that are sane on that folder, and it's files.

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[Fuzzy Greybeard]

"where people work on the things that interest them"

People ALWAYS work on what interests them. The question is not "what", but "why" does the interest happen and "why" does the interest sustain. Consider the following hypothesis:

- In the corporate world, the interest is maintained because of financial or power rewards.

- In the dungeons of the cubical world, the interest is held by ?fear of losing income?, ?need for cash to survive?, ?lack of imagination? or any of a number of 'basic survivalist' needs.

- IN the FOSS world, I can think of dozens of reasons for holding my interest. Some of which include ... artistic expression; no boss to say 'release it by wednesday, bugs or no'; self improvement; it's a hobby; peer acknowledgement; one way of advertising skills.

I note that in the corporate world, one of the world's leading bug/virus hunters recently resigned - speculation being 'he was bored'. Which leaves us where?