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Interview with Andrew Tridgell
Posted by
michael
on Fri Oct 04, 2002 02:42 PM
from the sharing-made-easy dept.
from the sharing-made-easy dept.
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "See here for a *great* interview with tridge. My favourite quote: 'In 50 years' time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another,' Tridgell says. Cheers, Jeremy."
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Samba versus rsync (Score:4, Insightful)
Good article, but don't let RMS read it!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Hear that "whirr"? That's Stallman spinning in his grave, and he's not even dead yet!
Re:Good article, but don't let RMS read it!!! (Score:2)
Re:Good article, but don't let RMS read it!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're making some unwarrented assumptions here. Why should a free implementation of SMB upset RMS? It's better than a non-free implementation of SMB. If you're in a position where you can control what you're running on your organisation's file servers, but you can't control what's on the desktop, using Samba is currently the only ethical course of action available to you.
What might even be better, or at least ethically equivalent and practically easier, is to have a free software implementation of NFS for non-free platforms like Windows (I'm not aware of any), as you don't have to reverse engineer, and re-reverse engineer every couple of years, a secret, proprietary standard to make it work. And it means that some proprietary networking software on the client machines has been replaced by free software.
The article is actually quite good (the AFR is the only Australian paper worth reading). It uses the term "free software" several times and doesn't even mention that "open source" fad from a couple of years ago. Whatever happened to that, BTW?
Re:Good article, but don't let RMS read it!!! (Score:2)
It's not named GNU/Samba. :-)
Heh (Score:3, Redundant)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
More Important Question (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:More Important Question (Score:3, Funny)
I'm bookmarking your post as prior art.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
- We decided not to emulate that. We contact Microsoft about these bugs, and we get back emails saying, 'Have you got your computer switched on? Are you sure you've got all the latest patches?' Of course, you idiot! Just put me through to someone who knows what they're doing," he says.
I'm just thinking how much fun that "data chunk" would be at the University. And in a sick sort of way, I wish they would emulate that.Don't understand SMB...we'll do it for you! (Score:2, Redundant)
Good to know that at least somebody understands it...
Re:Don't understand SMB...we'll do it for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
While the Samba folks have done us Linux folk a tremendous favor (reverse engineering *any* protocol is difficult) in encapsulating all of the SMB details via Samba, they have also performed a huge service to MicroSoft and the rest of the closed-source world by hammering on the various platforms that come out of Redmond. As the article points out, every new version (or patch release) is put through it's paces against Samba. Although their primary goal is to ensure compatibility, the secondary effect is extremely valuable to non-Samba users: bugs in server software from a closed source vendor are exposed (and hopefully fixed).
The difficulty is that the rest of the world (and probably MicroSoft in particular), either doesn't see, or see's but turns a cold shoulder none-the-less to the open source community.
Thank you Andrew for your work and the work of your team.
Parent
Re:Don't understand SMB...we'll do it for you! (Score:2)
``A lot of the really technical people who really understood the protocol appear to have left Microsoft."
From the rumors surrounding the release of Win2000, I suspect that this loss of technical expertise is not limited to the SMB protocol alone.
Geoff
In 50 years... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, I don't know 'bout that... it's been at least a few centuries since Waltz was invented and I know a few folks who still cut the rug in 3/4 time! *rimshot*
wasn't one of the developers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wasn't one of the developers (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wasn't one of the developers (Score:3, Funny)
How's that for a coincidence?
Ha! (Score:2)
Oh wait, your not trolling...
(Psst... I know your trolling. I love you're method. Now you write back, but don't let everybody else know...)
Thank You. (Score:5, Insightful)
Andrew, thanks for envisioning this project, and getting up all started. Thanks also to your wife for putting up with it, I'm not sure mine would have
The developer list is growing, and I've never even read messages from some from some of you, but it's worth taking the time to personally express thanks as individually as this forumn allows.
Jeremy Allison
Andrew Tridgell
John Terpstra
Chris Hertel
John Blair
Gerald Carter
Michael Warfield
Brian Roberson
Jean Francois Micouleau
Simo Sorce
Andrew Bartlett
Motonobu Takahashi
Jelmer Vernooij
Richard Sharpe
Eckart Meyer
Herb Lewis
Dan Shearer
David Fenwick
Paul Blackman
Volker Lendecke
Alexandre Oliva
Tim Potter
Matt Chapman
David Bannon
Steve French
Jim McDonough
*Luke Leighton
*Elrond
*Sander Striker
Thank You. You have done a great service for us all, and we are very much in your debt.
Kevin Anderson
Samba will be remembered as the Microsoft D-Day (Score:3, Interesting)
The best thing is that our Samaba soldiers will still live on to write other great software to help us rid our lives of Microsoft software.
Thanks samba team even though I rarely use your Samba software anymore. I use rsync all the time on my Gentoo systems!
rsync (Score:5, Funny)
I made it so.
I'm a good husband.
Besides, these things are not just toys right? It was damn easy. Buying as much as an NT server still costs no less than $500 on ebay. samba cost about 5 minutes in FTP to get the latest for RedHat. On my K6-233 Asus tx97x its flawless. Flawless i say.
Ramble on.
Everytime I login I feel a little geekdom. Everytime my wife *doesen't* complain about the computer I feel like THE MAN. You see in my house I am Bill Gates. If windows breaks, I get the blame. If Linux is too confusing, I get the blame. So what we have here is the best of both worlds. BTW, i used to get pissed at the IT department for taking so long to launch new OSes. Now I am about to take XP off my computer because its loosing faxes and the printer dont work on it, etc... Its affecting my love life
Re:rsync (Score:2)
In 50 years? Think so? (Score:4, Interesting)
Think so? The Univac was state of the art in 1952. Considering that the progress of technology is accelerating over time (check out The History of Computing Timeline [computer.org]), do you really think that the ideas behind rsync are going to be relevant? Network throughput is already getting massive. If we could fast-forward to 2052, I imagine we would barely recognize the technologies in use.
Do you think that Turing could have even fathomed performing a billion operations a second and having a almost a terrabyte of storage available and (almost) accessible anywhere on the planet at megabit data transfer rates? In our homes? For an inflation adjusted price of under $100? You have to be kidding me -- it would have blown his mind.
In 2052 CPU power will be effectively unlimited (imagine doing a billion billion operations per second), storage constraints meaningless, and, if networking trends continue and/or quantum plays out (as it may), effectively instantaneous access to that data.
Think we'll still be diff-ing data to squeeze the most out of the net? In 2052 that is the last thing we'll be bothering with.
All this only hold true of course if we assume that technology will improve as fast as it historically has and that we don't hit a cataclysmic end to human progress in general (plague, nuclear armageddon, etc). But if the last 50 years have been any indication, what we will see in 2052 will bare little resemblance to what we have in 2002.
Re:In 50 years? Think so? (Score:2)
Oh, and I forgot to add, Samba rocks, rsync rocks, and Andrew Tridgell rocks. I don't mean at all to take away from the contributions of an amazing individual in the open source movement.
But what you've not accounted for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention fully volumetric video feeds.
Parent
Re:In 50 years? Think so? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, historically raw computing power has increased more rapidly than network bandwidth. Rsync is essentially about using compute power to save bandwidth, using hashes and checksums to avoid transferring unnecessary bytes. So the cost/benefit will likely still hold. The network may be faster, but the files will be bigger and the CPU will be faster still.
That said, rsync as a command-line utility will almost surely be gone, but the ideas in rsync may well migrate directly into the application layer or even the network stack. At least, it's more likely to be around than samba, which is a fantastic yet special purpose tool for a specialized problem (Windows compatible file-sharing).
Besides, tridge got his CompSci Ph.D. for his rsync work, so nobody should be surprised he's proud of it.
Matt
Re:In 50 years? Think so? (Score:2)
Fifty years ago people thought that we all would be flying around in personal airplanes by now.
It's not usually valid to stretch a trend out beyond a decade. Unlike the last 20 years of computing, we are running into the fundamental limits of physics: the size of the atom and the speed of light. Not saying that we won't come up with something clever.
Almost over my head (Score:2, Funny)
It took me a second read to realize that asking for the "wrong thing" from your waitress might get you that proverbial slap in the face!
Rsync good (Score:4, Informative)
- file ownership
- permissions
- symlinks
- special files (devices, etc)
- hard links
Great bit of software. Perhaps not as technically excellent as Samba, which is more complex, but very useful.Also (Score:3, Informative)
Whither rproxy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone have empirical evaluations of deltas (including, but not necessarily limited to, rproxy) on today's workloads?
Re:i want this sequence (Score:4, Interesting)
Jeremy.
Parent
Re:i want this sequence (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Not just Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
So I downloaded a bug report form from the IBM website, filled in all details and sent it off. After a while I got a response. I could not make heads or tails of it. It was in some kind of IBM speak. (IBM speak really exists. Do they still call a harddisk a "hard file"? :-)
So I forwarded the message to Timothy Sipples, who had been very active on Usenet and had just started working for IBM. He translated it for me: I was not a big account customer so they would not accept the bug report. Sigh...
Soon after that, Linux became my main OS.
(I actually made a patch for smbclient [jacco2.dds.nl] so that it would not kill OS/2, but I never forwarded it to the Samba people).
Parent
Re:50 years? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:2)
I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
just 1
i dare you.
(seeing as - to the best of my knowledge - no open/free licence has existed for more than 16 years it would be tough).
Your problem is that closed projects burst fully formed (although mostly deformed) into the public arena, open projects are kicking around in public from the start of their process.
interestingly this also applies to security fixes, where in the free world the fix is released on the basis of a theoretical exploit, whereas in the closed world a practical exploit is in the wild before you see a security patch.
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose my point is that if we were able to survive the y2k bug without much of a real problem (sure some things were broken, but compared to what we were told was going to happen, it was really smooth), we ought to be able to do the same with *nix, only much easier.
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:3, Funny)
If I were you, I'd start stocking up on canned food, and non-electronic forms of currency like rolls of toilet paper.
Y10K (Score:2)
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:2)
Congratulations, you have just been selected for the ultimate geek award!
Hint: people that don't know about 1024 would have probably said either 300 billion years or 301 billion years.
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:2)
But actually the true doomsday is not until about 2100, because this is only for *signed* 32-bit integers. If you assumme unsigned then you get twice as long from 1970 before it overflows. You can also do "sliding window" hacks like those proposed for Y2K that will allow code that relies on negative values to work as long as the negative value is not too big.
Another reason that this is not a problem is that the 1-second resolution is increasingly becoming a problem and I expect virtually all uses of time in Unix to be replaced before then with some higher-resolution thing. Hopefully when this is done they will add enough extra bits so there is no overflow problem for many millenia. Probably 64 bits where 65536 is one second would be a good replacement. 64-bit IEEE floating point might also be good, it would allow short time intervals to be accurate to less than Plank time and allow Universe-age time intervals to be represented with a fraction of a second of accuracy, though the fact that addition is not communative might make people not want to use this.
Re:Hello! UNIX doesn't have a Y2K bug! Y2K is over (Score:2)
back in 1998 I was working for a HP VAR. We had several customers who could not upgrade their systems from HP-UX 9. Unfortunately HP's Y2K "solution" for HP-UX 9 was upgrading to HPUX 10 or 11. Most of these users were planning on setting the system clocks back 32 years.
There were a number of vile hacks put into place to get us past Y2K such as pivot dates and setting system clocks back. Hopefully these hacks won't come back to haunt us in a few years.
Re:In 50 years, I doubt many will know what Unix i (Score:2, Informative)
There is nothing about 32-bit processors that prevents 64-bit datatypes from being emulated. Many Unixes are already migrating; the new time_t structures really are 64-bit. Java time, and I'm sure there's lots of other examples, is 64-bit as well.
A couple you missed (Score:2)
Re:Back to life... Back to reality (Score:5, Informative)
Samba isn't developed my Microsoft; SMB is. And the problems SMB solves are fading even now; in 50 years there's no way that SMB will be useful. Microsoft will have moved on to something else.
And, of course, rsync isn't part of the rlogin/rsh/rwhatever toolset. It's completely independant.
The reason that rsync might still be used is that it implements a really powerful algorithm to do its job, which is being adopted in many cutting-edge projects. I don't know if those cutting-edge projects will have relatives which are still in use in 50 years, but they have more of a chance than Samba.
-Billy
Parent
Re:SMB not necessary? (Score:2)
If you're dealing with a free Unix (Linux, BSD etc), the most 'standard' way for mounting network partitions is using NFS (the Network Filesystem. [sourceforge.net])
Several companies will sell you NFS utilities for Windows. nfsAxe [labf.com] is by the people who make WinaXe, a Win32 X server. A quick search doesn't turn up a standard Windows open-source solution for this.
SMB has been rebranded by Microsoft as CIFS, the Common Internet File System [samba.org]. Microsoft have all the official docs, but of course samba.org have more information about it than they do.
Samba is supported by all Windows machines. It doesn't even work too badly for sharing filesystems between unices (I have a public SMB share on a FreeBSD file server machine mounted on my Linux gateway: you wouldn't know it wasn't a local FS.) The permissions model isn't perfect, of course, but for a shared FS, it works good.
Your question asked "is there a better way." Well, without getting into what's wrong with Samba, it's hard to answer. If you want Windows interoperability (and it's hard to find a situation where it's not a plus), you can't go wrong with Samba. It's a very mature, stable, complete solution.
Re:That's a great interview? (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't a tech piece on Linux Orbit.
this is a mostly technically literate puff piece on linux in the newspaper that the suits of a modern nation read (roughly equivalent to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times).
thats what's newsworthy about it.
Plus Tridge lives in Canberra so he's all right unlike the rest of you bastards who pick on us (sorry, local grievances there).