Samba Team members Volker Lendecke, Jeremy Allison, and Jim McDonough today released a personal statement in reaction to comments made by Krishna Ganugapati in an interview. The entire statement is reprinted below.

Samba and GUIs

Krishna Ganugapati recently in an interview pointed out that Samba has no GUI style tools. Krishna is probably referring to Samba's capability to be configured by editing the configuration in the smb.conf file.

• Even though command shell geeks may still prefer this method, the team addresses the main goal of Samba to provide seamless interoperability with Windows clients. So, in its best sense, the Microsoft Management Console is the GUI. We provide the RPC-based infrastructure for Windows administrators to configure Samba using the tools they are used to.

  Some of those RPC services were provided a couple of years ago by Centeris, now renamed to Likewise, the company Krishna is working for. Thanks for that, we hope there will be more contributions to Samba like that from Likewise in the future!

• Michael Adam has done great work to make the registry-based configuration happen. With Samba 3.2 and even more so with Samba 3.3 you can configure everything you can not do via the MMC with your well-known regedit.exe from Windows. This very well matches expectations of Windows administrators: The normal day-to-day administration is done via the MMC, and when it comes down to fine-tuning, you need to dive into the registry.

  For an introduction to the registry configuration, see Michael's paper, presented at the Linux Kongress 2008, published in the proceedings with ISBN 978-3-86541-300-0.

• Günther Deschner has developed a gtk-based utility to join a domain. Screenshots can be found on samba.org. This shipped with Samba 3.2.0 and can be compiled easily wherever the gtk libraries are available. See the slides of Günther's 2008 SambaXP talk.

We also take issue with Likewise's claim that pushing changes upstream into Samba is a challenge.

The Samba project has many corporate contributors who have found that working with the Open Source/Free Software Community is preferable to developing a parallel technology under their sole control. Companies such as IBM, HP, Intel, Apple, Red Hat, Novell, Isilon, Data Domain, ReadyNAS (now NetGear) and Veritas (now Symantec) have worked with the Samba Team to create a shared, compelling file, print and authentication service that can be used by everyone and is developed as a community of equals.

Volker Lendecke, Jeremy Allison, Jim McDonough, Lars Müller, Michael Adam and Günther Deschner
Samba Team

Updated: The signature on the original statement has been updated to include supporting signatures from Lars Müller, Michael Adam, and Günther Deschner.