New Features In Samba 2.2 And 3.0 21
chromatic writes "Dustin Puryear has written a nice article summarizing the new and upcoming features of Samba. He's included a nice overview of what will be available when version 3.0 escapes. Let's hear it for interoperability!"
Interoperability (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the most commonly heard objections to interoperability software of any kind. It is usually formulated in terms of the specification being a "moving target" and that "MS can break it any time they want".
This is rubbish.
What gives Microsoft leverage over the desktop market is their present installed population. They can't go around breaking compatibility with existing products, as they cannot expect everyone to upgrade everything immidiately. The CIFS specification itself might be a "moving target", but the actual implementations in the field that it needs to be able to interoperate with are not.
As amazing as it sounds, vendor lock-in works both ways.
So true (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things I've wondered, however, is what does Microsoft have to lose by opening up SMB? It seems strange to me that nobody can see that most open operating systems can do it the correct way and the Microsoft way (at least limitedly), while Microsoft has self-imposed limitations that prevent them from being part of a much larger machine. Another example of these self-imposed limitations is the extremely limited selection of filesystems available to Windows (NTFS, FAT, FAT32), yet, in Linux, I probably have close to, if not over, 100 options that I can choose from including the Windows offerings.
Re:So true (Score:4, Insightful)
This (unfortunately) makes sense from a business perspective; they're much larger than the "critical mass" needed for them to set their own standards. Any extensive form of interoperability would make it much easier for people to install a mixed network instead of moving to all-Microsoft, or even moving away from MS technologies for certain machines.
This doesn't imply a monopoly situation, but rather it's their way of trying to force us to build homogenous networks instead of making it easier to sneak in a few other machines.
Re:Interoperability (Score:5, Insightful)
And remember: The spec is not only changing, it is also *hidden from sight*! The SAMBA team does *not* have access to it at all. I don't know about you, but packet sniffing for a few hours just to figure out how a simple login works doesn't sound like an easy task to me.
There are many reasons why SAMBA should fail, the fact that it is kept as close to the current CIFS implementation (as dictated by MS) as it is, is nothing short of amazing.
Dustin Puryear (Score:1)
www.sblug.org
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NT SAM (Score:2, Interesting)
For *nix to succeed in the enterprise, it needs to do *all* the enterprise level things, without resorting to one vendor solutions such as Enterprise Server.
Windows Interoperability (Score:4, Interesting)
As more and more of Microsoft's efforts start going towards Palladium, how will this affect Samba?
Not trying to create FUD but I'm just curious where things are heading. As it is now, anyone could setup a Samba server - which is great - and anything that makes interoperability between these operating systems is good, good for users of both OS's.
Re:Windows Interoperability (Score:4, Informative)
Question: How is Samba TNG doing? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.samba-tng.org/mailinglists.html
Has that work been merged into Samba? Has it been converted to Samba plugins? Is it still going on? If so, what's the progress?
Re:Question: How is Samba TNG doing? (Score:4, Informative)
TNG has apparently ground to a halt and has been overtaken by the main Samba branch.
NFS and Samba (Score:2)
Anyone know if this gets rid of the (dot) .files created by window clients? very annoying.
Samba is at 2.2.7 now, not 2.2.4 (Score:2, Interesting)
Hi, this article seems a bit 'stale' to me. It states that samba is at 2.2.4 at the time of writing and according to my latest Freshmeat notification [freshmeat.net]:
This email is to inform you of release '2.2.7' of 'Samba' through freshmeat.net.
The changes in this release are as follows:
A security hole has been discovered in versions 2.2.2 through 2.2.6 of Samba that could potentially allow an attacker to gain root access on the target machine. The word "potentially" is used because there is no known exploit of this bug, and the Samba Team itself has not been able to craft one. In addition to addressing this security issue, this release also includes thirteen unrelated improvements.
Ease of Use, How to do it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using samba for over 5 years now in a large company with a mixed flavour unix and windows network environment.
When implementing samba I've always come across the same problems:
The article says:
It's very easy to use Samba as a PDC. Simply enable a few options in the Samba configuration file, add users to the local Samba password database, and build machine accounts for each Windows NT machine on the network.
I find this at least peculiar.
When you have 500 users you are not simply going to 'add users to the local samba password database', especially not when you need to run samba on more that 4 machines simultaniously. One of the things I had to do to get this working was sniff all the passwords from the network (wasn't too hard, since we use unencrypted NIS, so all passwords travel the LAN in plain text) and then add them to the smbpasswd file with a specially manufactured perl script.
Also the 'simply enable a few options' isn't as simple as it seems, since even man smb.conf doesn't seem to have consequent answers for every switch you can set (and there are dozens of them).
Most of the features that this article is about have been around for a few years now and still haven't improved much.
I hope to see the day that installing and configuring samba for a medium to large corporation is really easy and clear. For now I'll just live with the kwirks.
Just for the record: I'm not saying samba is a bad product, it just needs a lot of better documentation and ease of use and installation for larger userbases.
Re:Ease of Use, How to do it? (Score:1, Informative)
There is no satisfying some people - you get great software like Samba for free, and then complain about the lack of documentation - when plenty of it exists.
Even the samba project itself has a samba books page here
http://au1.samba.org/samba/books.html
Here is a thought. Think about what your life would be like without samba. Then realise how your life is better because of samba, and then realise that you got it for free. Wow.
Be thankful for what you've got.
If you don't think good documentation exists, rather than complaining, give some value back by contributing better documentation.
Re:Ease of Use, How to do it? (Score:1)
I own 3 samba books, which all help really much to help understand how samba works, but are no real help when it comes to actually implementing it. It still needs a lot of testing.
The 'for free' part is really great, but then again, I wouldn't have used it in the first place if it wasn't free. Oh and just for the record I am thankful.
I have contributed (more then once) to better documentation by supplying bug reports for the samba man pages but up till now I've been quite disappointed in the speed at which these get into the distribution. But hey, that was two years ago, things might have changed.