Samba News in Team

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.

Silicon.com has posted their top agenda setters for 2008. The Samba Team's Jeremy Allison came in at 43 on the list, 4 steps ahead of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, thereby increasing Jeremy's Web 2.0 street cred.

On a more serious note, Jeremy was listed for his work as an ambassador of the free software movement.

It's his work to remove the barriers to interoperability between these two worlds - a key piece in enabling Linux to become accepted in the enterprise - that earns Allison a spot on this year's Agenda Setters list.

SearchEnterpriseLinux has an interview with Samba Team member Andrew Bartlett about Samba4. The ground covered in the interview provides answers to questions like what is Samba4, what does it do, and when will it be released? Andrew begins with a basic introduction to Samba4.

Samba 4.0, on the other hand, is a far broader effort. The code will undergo major restructuring and hopefully emerge with more consistency. For starters, version 4 will emulate Microsoft Active Directory to Microsoft clients in contrast with Samba 3, which looked like Microsoft Windows NT only to the network, he [Andrew Bartlett] said.

For the whole piece see, Samba 4 hits alpha status, but 2008 release unlikely.

The Google Summer of Code Blog has posted a podcast recorded from the recent CIFS Workshop held at Google Mountain View.

The podcast features several members of the Samba Team -- Jeremy Allison, Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij, Jerry Carter, Kai Blin, Rafal Szczesniak, Stefan Metzmacher and Steve French -- and is a fun listen, covering everything from Samba development itself to Samba's participation in the Google Summer of Code.

LinuxWorld San Francisco was last week, and Samba Team member Jeremy Allison hosted the annual Golden Penguin Bowl, this time appearing as Cyberman from Dr. Who. There is a video that was smuggled out for a behind the scenes look.

There event was also covered by CRN, see Linux Geeks Dust Nerds In Golden Penguin Trivia Bowl.

As Barry Bonds smashed Hank Aaron's home run record Tuesday evening at AT&T Park, another great sporting triumph went down less than a mile to the north at Moscone Center, where a team of Linux Geeks vanquished a Nerd squad of Dell employees in LinuxWorld's annual trivia smackdown, the Golden Penguin Bowl.

A bit from the opening of the interview, to get your started:

The latest code changes and improvements to Samba 3.0.25 weren't overly dramatic, said the project's release manager, but the subtle changes do push things along toward a scheduled production release in early April.

The changes also push Samba 3 along its path toward making Linux machines behave a bit more like Windows, said Samba release manager Jerry Carter.

For the rest, check out the complete interview.

While at LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in NY last week, Jerry Carter gave intrview to Search Open Source on the future of Samba. It's a short piece, but has some nice bullet points for what is going on in Samba development these days.

For those who haven't seen it yet, linuxworld.com has posted an extensive interview with Samba Team member Jeremy Allison. In the article, Jeremy discusses the Novell-MS agreement, his recent move to Google, GPL v3, and a host of other topics.

It's a well done interview and worth a read through. There's also a podcast of the interview linked from the article.

Seven new articles have been added to the archives of Jeremy Allison's Low Point column. New titles include: "In Search of Google", "Fear and Loathing in Cupertino", and "Signs and Portents".

As always, these are entertaining reads and cover a range of subjects and ideas. Check them out now!

Groklaw is reporting that our own Jeremy Allison has resigned from Novell. The resignation comes over concerns Jeremy has about the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, according to Jeremy's resignation letter reprinted on Groklaw.

The Microsoft patent agreement has put us outside the community, and there is no positive aspect to that fact, and no way to make it so. Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs.

Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be changed to remedy the GPL violation has passed, and so I must say goodbye.

The Samba Team calendar has been updated with events that Samba users and developers may find interesting.

Volker Lendecke, Günther Deschner, and Jerry Carter are at LinuxWorld events in November and February, and Jerry will also be at LISA '06 in Washington D.C.

See the Team calendar for more.

TWiT.TV's FLOSS Weekly with Chris DiBona has posted a new podcast featuring our own Jeremy Allison. The site's teaser for the interview looks promising...

Jeremy Allison on Samba, Vista, and James Bond.

FLOSS Weekly is always well done and interesting, so be sure and check out Jeremy's episode.

The guys from Novell Open Audio have posted an interview with Samba Team members Lars Müller and Günther Deschner. The two discuss their work within SuSE Labs to make SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 integrate with Active Directory. As the podcast blurb says:

From joining the Active Directory domain to initial login and Kerberos provisioning, this stuff is too cool.

Ted Haeger has more in his blog post Can Linux Desktops Live in an Active Directory World?. He's even got screenshots.

Lars and Günther should be proud of the work they're doing! And the podcast and blog stand as nice examples of that work.

From the man-jeremy-is-everywhere-online department...

Video is now available from the LinuxWorld San Francisco '06 Golden Penguin Bowl. See Novell go against Ubuntu in a match that astounds (which open source license is under review for an update? Bueller? Beuller?) and entertains, and also features Samba Team members Jeremy Allison as host — in what may be his coolest costume yet — and Jerry Carter as a judge.

Novell Open Audio is hosting a podcast of an interview with Jeremy Allison at LinuxWorld San Francisco. The interview was given from Novell's booth at LinuxWorld and features a live audience. Jeremy talks about the Penguin Bowl, his work at Novell, Novell's support of Samba development, and why he works on open source software.

Interesting stuff indeed. Listen and clap along at home.

LinuxWorld San Francisco is under way this week and several Samba Team members are giving talks and tutorials. If you're planning to attend, look for Jeremy Allison at the Golden Penguin Bowl and speaking on "user defined" shares, Jerry Carter talking on Kerberos in mixed environments, and Lars Müller and Günther Deschner speaking on Linux clients in AD environments.

For more, see the LinuxWorld San Francisco conference schedule.

Two new columns have been added to the archive of Jeremy Allison's Low Point columns. Check out Embedded in a hospital, and "Trusted" Computing.

If those titles don't pique your interest, nothing will.

Novell Open Audio has posted a podcast with Jeremy Allison. In the podcast, Jeremy talks a bit about Samba's history, where Samba is heading over the next few months, and why he chose to work for Novell.

The audio file is available in both mp3 and ogg.

Three new columns have been added to the archive of Jeremy Allison's Low Point columns. Check out We are the champions..., Unintelligent Design, and Why we fight. Jeremy shares his thoughts on the Linux desktop, designing for users, and GPL v3 in this round of articles.

As always, Jeremy provokes thought and entertains, so check out the columns when time allows.

While at LinuxTag, Volker Lendecke gave an interview to Chaosradio. Volker talks about his work on Samba, the Microsoft case in the EU, and the future of Samba development.

The podcast is in German and available as part of Chaosradio's Chaosradio Express programming.

The LinuxWorld Blog has posted a podcast of John Mark Walker interviewing Jeremy Allison. Topics covered include: the relationship between Samba 3 and 4, DRM and GPL v3, and why all software will one day be free thanks to the GPL.

A longer, unedited MP3 is available alongside the edited MP3 from the link above.

ZDNet has posted a slideshow of photos from LinuxWorld Boston's Golden Penguin Bowl. Jeremy Allison hosted the event as usual — check out that apropos costume :-) — with teams from MySQL and Oracle battling it out for the prize penguin statues.

The slideshow has some nice photos and even captures the flavor of a few of the questions and jokes. Look for our own news.samba.org slideshow coming soon.

The Low Point Archives, a listing of Jeremy Allison's columns from Linux User & Developer, have been updated with two new columns. Jeremy writes about women in Open Source development in column 10, Macho Geek Madness. And for an interesting read on bumping into the Entertainment industry at a conference, see column 11, The Land of "Nothing for Free".

An entertaining and insightful read as always.

LinuxElectrons is reporting on Tridge having completed his OSDL fellowship.

"An enormous amount of progress towards the completion of Samba 4 was made while I was an OSDL fellow, which culminated in the release of the first technology preview release of Samba4 last week," said [Samba creator Andrew] Tridgell. "Having time to concentrate just on the one project really helped."

Best wishes to Tridge as he returns to work at IBM.

The Samba Team calendar has been updated with information on several new conferences and tutorials. See the Samba Team Calendar for complete details.

This calendar is not an endorsement of any individual speaker or event. Its purpose is merely to make the Samba community aware of a wide variety of events, as well as to make available a partial record of Samba Team activity.

New dates will be added to the calendar as they become available.

Congratulations to Samba creator Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell for being presented the 2005 Award for the Advancement of Free Software!

For those who haven't yet seen, Samba4 has been slashdotted. The story points to the ZDNet Australia coverage which has also been linked by Linux Today. LXer covered our own posting of the Samba4.0.0TP1 release.

Linux Format has an interview with Jeremy Allison. Jeremy discusses the development direction of Samba4 and its LDB and Kerberos back-ends.

Submitted by Nate.

Jeremy Allison wrote an expanded version of "A Tale of Two Standards" that appears in Open Sources 2.0 under a Creative Commons license. (The original article can be found in our archive of Jeremy's columns.)

The Open Sources 2.0 version, with its greater detail, provides an excellent overview of the differences in the POSIX and Win32 APIs. The article makes clear the need for open standards, has some great examples that draw on Jeremy's extensive experience, and serves as an introduction to the complexity of the Samba project's task.

So go now and read the newly archived copy of A Tale of Two Standards (as published in Open Sources 2.0). It will certainly be time well spent.

Samba Team developer Jeremy Allison writes a regular column for Linux User & Developer. Jeremy will be republishing his articles here on news.samba.org after they appear in print. These articles are unique in their perspective and tone, as unique as Jeremy himself. So if you'd like to visit current issues in Free/Open Source Software with someone who'll give it to you straight and have something useful to say too, then check out the first 9 pieces from The Low Point — a View from the Valley in the new Low Point column archive.

New articles will be added to the archive as they become available. So check back often!

Business Wire is reporting that Samba Team member Jerry Carter has taken a position with Centeris.

"With Samba, the focus has been on features and network protocols, while the polishing work -- like providing the ability to manage those features in a way that's familiar to Windows administrators -- has been necessarily postponed," said Carter. "Until Centeris Likewise, companies who chose open source had to undertake this polishing work themselves. The appeal of Centeris is their technology paves the way for wider deployment of Samba and Linux than previously has been possible for many organizations."

Our best to Jerry in the new position! For the complete story, see Centeris Adds Windows and Linux Experts from Microsoft and HP.

The Samba Team calendar has been updated. See the Team calendar for information on Jerry Carter and Deryck Hodge at LISA '05 December 4-9 and Volker Lendecke at LinuxWorld Frankfurt November 15.

The Samba Team calendar is not an endorsement of any individual speaker or event. Its purpose is to make the Samba community aware of a wide variety of events, as well as to make available a partial record of Samba Team activity.

New dates will be added to the calendar as they become available.

O'Reilly has released Open Sources 2.0 a second edition to the popular Open Sources (1999). Jeremy Allison has written a chapter for the book entitled "A Tale of Two Standards." The book looks to be interesting reading, and Jeremy's piece certainly will be of interest to members of the Samba community.

The full text of the book will be available online from O'Reilly soon, or you can buy it here.

The Samba Team welcomes new Samba Team member, James Peach. James has worked in the SGI's Australian engineering team for a number of years, prior to which he worked on automated network discovery at Avaya Labs. At SGI he has worked on numerous file serving and networking projects including POSIX compliance, naming and PAM, NFS and NAS server management and monitoring.

Nowadays he spends most of his time on Samba, splitting his time between helping SGI customers with Samba problems and making sure that Samba runs well on scalable InfiniteStorage NAS systems. His main Samba focus is on performance and scalability, integration of Samba within a storage software stack, and file server management.

The following is taken from a recent email interview with James:

• When did you first start to take in interest in hacking on Samba?

  There was some internal reorganisation and maintenance of the SGI Samba product was assigned to my group which is involved in various storage and fileserving projects.

  After some discussions with customers, we realised that there were areas where we needed better Samba integration with the SGI software suite and areas where we needed to provide some performance improvements. This led to me becoming the SGI Samba maintainer on a most-time basis (that's full-time minus all the other stuff I have to do).

• You've got a long history of feeding patches to Team members before joining the Team. What areas in Samba have you worked on in the past?

  I started with a set of trivial patches that were specific to the IRIX environment and toolchain and I tend to fix IRIX build breakages when they occasionally happen. I'd like to think that my crufty directory traversal patch prompted Jeremy to fix the long standing performance problems enumerating large directories. I do need to sit down and push some of my patch backlog into svn though.

• Now that you're a part of the Team, what will your work focus on?

  Probably much the same. Within SGI we are really interested in scalability, so I'll be continuing to look at scaling Samba on high cpu count Altix and Origin servers.

  I'd like to be able to do more to increase the observability of Samba, so I'm planning on putting out an updated PCP agent soon, but that's really the tip of the iceberg. I'd also like to do more work in creating stable interfaces that other projects can use to develop software on top of Samba.

• How has being a part of the Samba Team for for the last month changed your life? ;-)

  Not very much so far. I'm trying to be a bit more conscientious about following the mailing lists.

For others interested in following Samba development (or maybe in helping with Samba development), samba-technical@lists.samba.org and #samba-technical is the best place to catch James and the rest of the Samba Team.

This past week saw several Samba Team members in San Francisco for LinuxWorld. The Golden Penguin Bowl featured Samba Team judges (Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, Gerald "Jerry" Carter, and Deryck Hodge), and Jeremy Allison once again hosted the event. Having Samba Team judges seemed appropriate with the Nerds being from Microsoft and the Geeks from Google. Jeremy even dressed up especially for the occasion.

The look is appropriate, don't you think? If you can name the character from Star Trek that Jeremy is dressed like, you might be ready to play in the next Penguin Bowl yourself. For more photos, see this slideshow from the Golden Penguin Bowl.

The 2005 CIFS Conference and Plugfest is over now. We've added a brief slide show to share some photos from the event. Judging by the pictures, we ate, hacked, and ate some more. (And made the occasional trip to Fry's.)

Also, the Samba Team page photo has been updated as well.

The new book Performance Tuning for Linux Servers from IBM Press contains a chapter on File and Print Server performance written by Samba Team member Steve French. The chapter discusses Samba and NFS performance concepts. Other chapters, especially those on networking and filesystem performance tuning for Linux, also could be helpful for Samba administrators.

For more, see the book's page on amazon.com

We are pleased to welcome Lars Müller to the Samba Team. Lars has been following the Samba project for a couple years now. Lars began with Samba as a part of Linux admin work at the University of Göttingen. There he was also involved in the creation of a campus wide network for students. Later, he started to work as a Linux support engineer. Both jobs required that Lars build customized Samba packages. He is currently in charge of Samba at SuSE Linux.

Lars began very early in his work at SuSE to submit all of his modifications upstream. He has actively worked with Samba Team members to coordinate the inclusion and maintenance of his patches and has shown his commitment to Samba and Open Source/Free Software by attending several events and conferences.

The following is taken from an email interview conducted just after Lars accepted the invitation to join the Samba Team.

• You've been working on Samba for awhile now. Do you see being a part of the Samba Team affecting or changing the way you work on Samba?

  Above all I expect some extra work. As I got the feeling of an open, communicative, and competent Team at mailing list, IRC and events, I expect an improvement to my technical and social skills. I'm far away from being bugfree in both directions. ;)

  But back to the question: I don't expect big changes in the way I work on Samba as I already tried to align all of the Novell/ SuSE work regarding Samba with the Team as close as possible. Therfore Samba.org efforts and my daytime work shouldn't conflict. I hope the opposite is the case and we'll have benefits for both.

  The biggest difference results from the write access I'll have to the subversion tree. My old position allowed me to open bugs, attach a suggested patch, send a mail to samba-technical, and ask one week later if this patch was garbage.

• Since you started as a sys-admin, how did you move into Samba development? Was this a difficult shift to make?

  Mostly missing features and problems reported by customers moved me to Samba development. I started with reading the Samba lists, rebuilding packages, and grabbing single patches. But it happened that a problem wasn't addressed upstream or wasn't solved acceptable for a Linux vendor. IIRC we had such a situation with CUPS and raw printing. That was the time when I started to get a more detailed picture of the Samba source code. And cscope and ctags are still very helpful.

  In my case it was a slow and not so difficult shift. It was slow as I first did support and on-site consulting. Here Samba's debug levels were gold. The output redirected me to the source code. As I had programmed in C before it also wasn't a too difficult shift.

• So what will you be working on now that you are part of the Team?

  I'll try to help with open issues in bugzilla to reduce our bug count. Beside that I'll try to enhance Samba 3. It's our bread and butter release at the moment.

  Lately I worked on migration issues. That work included a new sub command to the net tool to print a report of the content of an existing share.

Samba Team member Andrew Bartlett has written a paper on Samba4's GENSEC security subsystem and client credentials interfaces. Andrew will be presenting the information in this paper at sambaXP next week.

From Andrew's introduction:

The series of subsystems presented in this paper are the culmination of four years of thought and development, since the first 'Authentication rewrite' work on the then Samba HEAD development branch back in 2001.

Because Samba takes the challenge to match Microsoft's latest releases exactly, the issues surrounding Active Directory and modern security technologies quickly came to the fore. It is no longer possible to just pretend to be NT4 and hope that the clients did not expect any particularly difficult behaviour. With this incarnation of Samba these challenges are being tackled, not just worked around.

As he did with Active Directory in his Samba4 thesis, Andrew does a nice job of detailing the various GENSEC components. For the complete paper (in PDF), see GENSEC - Designing a security subsystem.