Presentations, tutorials, etc. by Samba Team members are listed in our:
If you haven't yet heard about the CIFS Engineering Workshop coming this fall, see the event's entry in the Samba Team calendar.
The Samba Team will be running a CIFS Engineering Workshop event hosted at the Google Campus in Mountain View, California, USA on September 26-28th 2007.
This event is intended for engineers working on any CIFS products and services, not just products based on the Samba codebase. We welcome engineers from any implementers of the CIFS and SMB2 protocols, or from people shipping products based on these protocols, or people with a deep interest in advancing the standardization of these protocols.
Link | Posted at 14:19
The next Samba bugzilla day is schedule for Thursday, Feb 22 from 6am - 6pm Pacific Standard Time US (GMT-8). Meet up on the #samba-technical IRC channel at irc.freenode.net and prepare to beat up on 3.0.25pre1.
If you have any questions about how to get started, you can find Jerry Carter on #samba-technical as coffeedude.
Link | Posted at 11:49
The first Samba bugzilla day is schedule for Thursday, Feb 8 from 6am - 6pm Pacific Standard Time US (GMT-8). The theme for this week is "Windows Vista". Developers and Testers are encouraged to get your Vista boxes ready now, have the Samba 3.0.24 and SAMBA_3_0_25 code bases built, and meet up on the #samba-technical IRC channel at irc.freenode.net.
There have been several bugs relating to Windows Vista filed so far. Patches for 3.0.24 will be posted on Friday, Feb 9, at http://www.samba.org/samba/patches/.
Link | Posted at 15:19
The TRUNK of our Subversion repository has historically been used for new feature development with stable changes being merged to the SAMBA_3_0 branch. Lately, TRUNK and SAMBA_3_0 have been completely in sync, forcing the need for small patches to be applied to both branches and creating a lot of branch maintenance overhead. Release manager Jerry Carter proposed a solution:
trunk has served its purposes in the past but really is of little use today. I propose that we
- Use SAMBA_3_0 solely for development and drop trunk.
- When we are close to shipping 3.0.24, we copy SAMBA_3_0 to SAMBA_3_0_24 to stabilize. but normal dev work goes on in SAMBA_3_0. This also prevents the loss of history when we cut-over from trunk to SAMBA_3_0.
- Continue to use /branch/SAMBA_3_0_RELEASE to cut the tarballs for official releases.
After Derrell's suggestion to use svn:externals property settings, the decision was made to replace TRUNK with a series of svn:external properties that pull current sources from the SAMBA_3_0 branch.
So what's all this mean? TRUNK is no longer used and commits are made solely in the SAMBA_3_0 branch. However, TRUNK will pull a copy of SAMBA_3_0 so that automated testing tools relying on the presence of TRUNK will continue to work.
Link | Posted at 17:12
Ronan Waide has done some work updating mod_ntlm_winbind for Apache2. mod_ntlm_winbind is an Apache module that provides NTLM and Basic authentication via winbind. Support for both plaintext and NTLM auth in the same module as also been added.
The module source is available for the interested.
Link | Posted at 12:10
ZDNet is reporting that open source coders' speed astounds Coverity. This is in reaction to the speed with which potential bugs reported by Coverity have been cleaned up.
"My impression is that the open source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate," Ben Chelf, the chief technology officer at Coverity, said in the statement.
Samba is mentioned specifically, too.
Samba, a popular open source project used to connect Linux and Microsoft Windows networks, showed the fastest developer response, Coverity said. The number of flaws was reduced from 216 to 18 in one week and to zero in two weeks.
Link | Posted at 09:40
The Samba Team is happy to report that Samba is now free from Coverity reported defects!
Coverity recently ran a scan of open source projects, which included Samba's TRUNK branch. Coverity's site describes their scan as:
[...] a new baseline for software quality and security in open source based on the analysis of over 30 of the most critical and widely used open source projects in the world. Under a contract with the Department of Homeland Security, we apply the latest innovation in automated defect detection to uncover some of the most critical types of bugs found in software.
The initial scan reported 216 potential bugs in Samba. In a week and a half, Samba Team developers have fixed all reported bugs. These changes will be applied to the next 3.0.x release.
Link | Posted at 16:30
We are beta testing two new sites in the world of samba.org:
This will be the permanent home of project lists, status updates and what is happening with a given project or feature. The site's success will really depend on developer interaction and whether or not the community finds the status information helpful.
The unassigned projects are up for grabs if you would like to work on something. Eventually, we will link in a small description as the first blog entry for each item so you can have a better idea of what the project is about (rather than the few words on the front page).
Here you will find personal developer blogs. Your guess is as good as ours as to what will show up here. :-)
Link | Posted at 13:50
Günther Deschner has created Firefox search plugins for websvn.samba.org and bugzilla.samba.org. The plugins are available from http://samba.org/~gd. Once installed, the plugins will add a "Samba WebSVN" and "Samba Bugzilla" option to the search toolbar in the Firefox web browser. Simply enter a bug number to search Samba's Bugzilla site or a revision number to search Samba's web-based SVN repos.
Note: To install from the links above, you must be running Firefox as a user with write permission to the searchplugins directory of your Firefox installation. For more on Mozilla/Firefox search plugins, see the Mycroft Project (at mozdev.org).
Link | Posted at 16:20
During the last two weeks, several members from the Samba Team spent sometime in Germany attending WineConf and SambaXP. Wine HQ's latest Wine Weekly Newsletter offers a WineConf summary, which covers some of the discussions that were held between members of the Samba and Wine development communities.
The afternoon shifted into discussions with Samba. Many of the core Samba developers were in attendance, including Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, Andrew Bartlett, Jerry Carter, Jelmer Vernooji, and Volker Lendecke. One of the major Samba conferences, SambaXP, was being held following WineConf. As such, they rearranged their travel to pass through Stuttgart. It may be the only time we'll ever have the opportunity to meet with such a large group and it proved to be really interesting.
For the full summary, see Wine Weekly Newsletter, Issue #272.
Link | Posted at 10:20
José María Ruiz has taken over maintenance of tsig-gss. tsig-gss is a program, originally created by Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, that lets you register the IP-NAME pair in the Microsoft DNS Server used by Active Directory.
José María wrote via email:
This little app was somewhere lying around when a few months ago I saw it. It didn't work because it was so old — the libs it used were very different then. I spoke with Tridge and helped him update the script (it's written in Perl). The "new" tsig-gss works, and I've offered myself to help maintan it.
This updated version of tsig-gss is available here.
Link | Posted at 14:40
Samba Team member Chris Hertel has a new article up on Linux Magazine. The article provides a nice introduction to jCIFS and outlines some possible ways to use jCIFS as an interface to your CIFS server.
Here's a teaser from the piece:
jCIFS (http://jcifs.samba.org/) is the product of an unlikely union between Sun's Java and Microsoft's SMB/CIFS file sharing suite. jCIFS provides all of the tools a Java coder needs to get along in a Windows Network Neighborhood; jCIFS dances elegantly with Samba; and jCIFS runs on everything from palmtops to mainframes. Where else but in open source could such a story be told?
For the complete article, please see jCIFS: The SMB Can Opener.
Link | Posted at 14:30
Samba Team member and 3.0.x release manager Gerald "Jerry" Carter gave a talk on "The State of Samba" at LinuxWorld Boston this week. The talk serves as an overview of recent activity on Samba, as well as an overview of where Samba is headed. The slides from the talk are available online and serve as an excellent guide to the planned roadmaps for both Samba 3.0 and Samba4.
The "State of Samba" slides are available here.
Link | Posted at 13:10
Robert Szeleney reports that Samba has been ported to SkyOS. Here's his post to the samba mailing list:
I just want to announce that I successfully ported SAMBA without any modifications to SkyOS. If you want to take a look at the small SAMBA configuration utility used to configure SAMBA on SkyOS, you can take a look at http://www.skyos.org
Go check out the SkyOS website. Looks like a nice bit of work. Well done!
Link | Posted at 15:50
Nico Earnshaw has completed a thesis on the Samba community as part of his Bachelor of Arts Informatics degree at the University of Sydney. The work is a very fine study of the practices of members of the community, with particular attention paid to Samba Team developers (their motivations, goals, practices, etc.). The general question explored seems to be, how does being a part of the Samba community define a developer?
This research is an exploratory study into the constitution of identity in the Samba community. The results presented are based upon an analysis of documents, websites, internet-relay-chat (IRC), mailing lists, private correspondence and face-to-face interviews. The primary method of data collection was the semi-structured interview method.
The paper also draws on other research/writings on OSS communities, but the observations specific to Samba development and the Samba community are unique to this work. There are lots of nice quotes from Samba Team members, too. Nicely done, Nico.
To read the complete thesis, see The Samba Project: Transformation of Self through Open Source Software Development.
Link | Posted at 11:00
samba.org is pleased to announce that the web interface to our Subversion repositories has been successfully migrated to Viewcvs. We are using the 1.0 development branch of Viewcvs, but it has been customized to include a changeset view and a recent commits page. The web-app's design was also changed to reflect the new samba.org design. The ability to view changesets was a much requested feature, and these changes will be offered back to Viewcvs developers for their consideration.
You can view the Samba source through the newly upgraded Viewcvs install at http://websvn.samba.org/.
Link | Posted at 11:00
The conference portion of the "CIFS 2004 Conference and Plugfest" concluded yesterday, Wednesday, 11 August 2004. Several Samba Team members gave talks and tutorials. Highlights included Andrew Tridgell's two talks related to RPC testing in Samba4; Jeremy Allison's proposal of possible future extensions to the CIFS protocol; and Jerry Carter's talks on the Samba roadmap and on working with LDAP and CIFS. Samba Team members Chris Hertel, John Terpstra, Andrew Bartlett, and Steve French also gave talks during the conference.
For the rest of this week, Samba Team attention turns to the work to be done in the plugfest. Team members are working on the continued development of Samba 4, the Samba 3.2 merge which will integrate portions of the Samba4 smb and rpc client libraries, and the release of Samba 3.0.6 by week's end. Clearly, some exciting work is being done this week, including much related to Samba development, at the "CIFS 2004 Conference and Plugfest."
Link | Posted at 04:00