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Data Storage Linux Business

Samba 4 Reaches "Susan" Stage 274

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-love-that-description dept.
superfebs writes "Some day ago Samba4 reached a pretty serious test stage. Promises are beautiful: full SMB protocol implementation, Active Directory Domain Controller facility, and more; here's a full roadmap."
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Samba 4 Reaches "Susan" Stage More

Samba 4 Reaches "Susan" Stage

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  • Heavyweight Protocol. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:20PM (#11002109)
    "Samba 4 Reaches "Susan" Stage"

    So what happens when it reaches the "CowboyNeal" stage?

    • Re:Heavyweight Protocol. (Score:5, Funny)

      by DARKFORCE123 ( 525408 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:01PM (#11002317)
      I am more in the mood for a lightweight protocol . Get back with me when it reaches the 'Mary Kate Olsen' stage.
    • So what happens when it reaches the "CowboyNeal" stage?

      1. We start seeing duplicate releases of the same version...

  • Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:28PM (#11002148)
    Just remember, that if it wasn't for Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, most of the ideas in Samba 4 would never have even been thought of, never mind implemented.

    It'd be nice if they gave him some credit somewhere instead of just blanking him out because he 'rocked the boat'.
    • For more information on lkcl; Here is a quite interesting presentation by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (lkcl) from a SSLUG (a Danish LUG) meeting: http://sslug.mmmanager.org/Members/BabyTux/luke_le ighton [mmmanager.org]

    • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:44PM (#11002228)
      Is he the guy behind Samba TNG?

      I never knew the name but was told that he was difficult to work with. Classic innuendo tactics really, unless it happens to be the truth and that I can't judge.

      • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:5, Informative)

        by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @04:53PM (#11002989) Homepage
        yep, that's me.

        yes, i failed. i took on a fascinating and very large task - to help EVERYONE out of a difficult hole, both microsoft, the open source community AN D its users, AND microsoft and samba's competitors (the Storage Area Network community) i succeeded in getting the knowledge out there but i failed in implementing it in an "acceptable" way.

        yes, the times when i was working on samba got progressively more painful as the difference between the SAMBA_NTDOM and the main cvs branch got steadily further and further apart - in the end approximately 100,000 to 120,000 lines of code apart.

        yes, without the work that i did for four years, spurred by paul ashton's initial decoding of the NT domains logon system, the samba team would likely still be peddling you a system that was compatible with windows 95. that's a gross exaggeration: the Active Directory interoperability is a lot easier but still fraught with difficulties.

        one of the key problems was that andrew tridgell found it increasingly difficult to actually accept that i could think of things that he could not.

        he also had great difficulty, as most people do, in accepting the level of complexity of the MSRPC (aka DCE/RPC) subsystem and quite how inter-connected the whole thing is.

        in the end, i had to use other people (such as tim potter, to whom i am very grateful) to get ideas and code accepted.

        in particular, the winbind project: note the striking similarity between the use of unix domain sockets in winbind, which andrew tridgell reviewed and accepted, and the use of unix domain sockets in Samba TNG, which andrew tridgell REFUSED to review and REFUSED to accept.

        i was told, by andrew tridgell, things like "you should try to log in as root occasionally, and if you break out in a cold sweat, lie down for a while until the feeling goes away".

        whilst i learned an awful lot about systems programming from andrew, the way that he treated me was with disdain and complete lack of respect - which was terribly, terribly disappointing for me because, being absolutely honest, i loved and respected him greatly.

        anyway: he learned nothing from me, and consequently, he has set samba's development back by at least ten man-years.

        luke howard, in three years, ON HIS OWN, produced XAD (www.padl.com) which he has been selling for at least the past two years as a commercial product - an NT 5 Active Directory Server.
        • Thanks - a far more interesting response than I had imagined seeing here.

          Yup, I had noticed that Samba mainstream was drifting towards the TNG model when winbindd came out.

          What I said above was only part of the story though, the claim was that you wanted to introduce several additional daemons and this was deemed too complicated back then.

          All this is a few years back, I was a Samba administrator up until mid-2000 but have been in Novell shops with no smb since so my memory of the details is fading. Tha

          • several additional daemons (Score:5, Interesting)

            by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @05:32PM (#11003208) Homepage
            yes - i wanted to introduce several stand-alone daemons, for several reasons:

            1) project manageability.

            you tell people that samba is 350,000 lines of code and they freak out. you tell them that they can work on say writing a special samr daemon (e.g. a sql db one) which would be oh about 30-50k lines, and they start to calm down a bit.

            2) clear delineation and separation of code at logical boundaries.

            the complexity of the samba project was getting out of hand, and it is still out-of-hand.

            by introducing separate services, which almost every other implementor of NT-compatible servers have done, you don't end up feeling like you've swallowed a tiger. ... would anyone DREAM of merging postfix, cyrus, nntpd and apache into a single daemon??

            3) commercial and other-licensed-projects can interoperate.

            sun microsystems would never have bothered to license AT&T's AFPS code [NT 3.5 ported to SysV by microsoft - badly - and bought by AT&T].

            or, at least, if they had, they would have chucked away the file-server part of it, and used smbd as the file server, whilst still using the NT-based services from NT 3.5-ported-to-unix!

            and they would have used the published interfaces - the ones used to communicate with the external DCE/RPC services.

            the reasons i was quoted AGAINST doing separate services were that a) it would be several milliseconds too slow (which is a rubbish argument on a network-based protocol) and b) unix domain sockets cannot be used securely (which, given that they are used in winbind is again rubbish)

            no, the real reasons why samba was not turned into separate daemons was a) so that samba could be used to maintain control as a single GPL project b) because i was the one advocating it c) the level of complexity was not understood and i failed to explain it clearly enough.

            • Re:several additional daemons (Score:4, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05, 2004 @05:59PM (#11003386)
              So, you had better ideas and better code but, your fork died and the original branch continued.

              Your fork died because the original branch refused to merge your "superior" code and concepts? Come on, who's kidding who?

              SAMBA did not force you to abandon your fork. You could have continued with the SAMBA TNG fork. Had you produced superior concepts and code, as you claimed to have, I doubt that the community would continue to use the original "inferior" branch.

              • Re:several additional daemons (Score:5, Insightful)

                by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @08:15PM (#11004100) Homepage
                samba tng is still going: i don't actively work on it but elrond does.

                samba tng was, and still is, capable of acting as a PDC for thousands - yes, thousands - of users.

                samba tng is the only PDC that doesn't fall over when a few hundred students all simultaneously log in at once.

                i stopped working on samba tng because it was too distressing.

                and you know just as well as i do that better ideas are useless when there is a monopoly power already in place.
        • You are an interesting and insightful person. I volunteer to buy you a keyboard with working Shift keys; it would make reading your intervention so much more enjoyable.

      • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @05:43PM (#11003281) Homepage
        one other thing that i really should make clear is that i used - and still use - a programming technique which recently gained a name: "extreme programming".

        basically what i do is i build up a picture in my head of what results i want to achieve, and how, in broad architectural terms that that picture should be built.

        then i start incessantly, repeatedly, rapidly, bluntly and brutally chipping away at the details: in the case of coding that could result in 30 cvs commits per day.

        does this work? oops, no it didn't, let's try something else.

        occasionally, usually due to exhaustion or frustration, i would sit and re-think.

        i bounced hundreds of messages off of the samba mailing lists, most of which were not actually understood but that was okay because it allowed me to think out loud.

        this process drove jeremy allison completely nuts.

        jeremy's development model was radically different: very controlled, very calculated, very infrequent cvs commits (relatively speaking) - if it's not ready, if it don't work, it ain't going in the cvs repository.

        contrast this with me having at best a pentium 90 with 16mb of memory (my fastest machine) and having to do partial-builds (ccache didn't exist) due to a complete build taking 90 minutes, and random cvs commits in case someone stole my computer from the cybercafe... ... i frequently had no choice but to commit in code at the risk of breaking the build.

        this also drove jeremy nuts.

        c'est la vie.

        • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I'm not surprised they chucked you off the project then. In the long run, it makes sense to try to work well with others, even if it does mean short term compromises.

          You need to learn from your social mistakes in the same way you learn from coding/design errors.

          • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:5, Interesting)

            by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @06:00PM (#11003400) Homepage
            working with others requires cooperation both ways.

            _i_ have learned where i have failed.

            now PLEASE will you do me the favour of communicating to andrew and to jeremy where THEY have failed.

            the samba team is not a team at all: it is a group of people who work on their own areas with hardly any actual cooperation at all.

            i WISH that the samba project had an ASF charter, with an additional clause that lends equal weight to "strategic" decisions in the part about code being accepted on "technical merit".

            if the ASF charter was in place on the samba project, so many many people would not have left it in frustration.

            there is much more that i could say but the number of comments on this topic is getting high (and consequently thinner), and is distracting me from my work.

          • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:4, Interesting)

            by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @06:02PM (#11003414) Homepage
            p.s. they didn't throw me off: i left. too many incredibly hurtful comments from andrew. the one i will always remember is where he thanked tim potter for completing winbind, without acknowledging that i had helped nor that winbind would have even been possible without the dce/rpc client libraries i'd written.

          • Re:Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @06:19PM (#11003516) Homepage
            I'm only going to say one thing here, and then leave it at that. As has been pointed out before, Luke has a very selective memory about his involvement with Samba.

            Yes he made substantial contributions, for which we were very grateful, but in the end the difficulties in working together outweighed the benfits.

            I'm not going to say any more - those who are interested can read the relevent email archives.

            Jeremy.

        • First, I have no idea who you are, nor do I know anything about SAMBA politics. For that matter, I don't know much about SAMBA either.

          Here is an idea. Learn how to use your shift key. I've only read about 10 of your posts in this discussion, and I have already decided that the other guy is right.

  • this was posted like... two or three weeks ago.
    • You can say "clearly this is a dupe," without adding anything else if it is a dupe of something that has beeen on the front page in the last 48 hours. However, beyond that, you really should add a link of some sort.

      It's not that I don't believe you, but since neither google nor slashdot's search came up with anything that resembles a dupe (that I could find), I'm a bit skeptical. Maybe you weren't reading slashdot? Maybe you were reading the samba forums?

      So for all of you still reading, if you're going

  • Andrew Tridgell - a free software hero (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mralert ( 837483 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:29PM (#11002160) Homepage
    Andrew Tridgell is the man behind two of the most interesting and usable free software products available; samba [samba.org] and rsync [samba.org]. Samba is truly great, but I find rsync so incredibly useful and smart. Does the Windows world have any kind of rsync-equivalent? (Besides the Windows rsync-ports, which require a lot of extra stuff like Cygwin.) Backing up data with rsync makes me sleep well at night :-) Thanks Tridgell! :-)

  • Samba's great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:38PM (#11002199)
    It can be a pain to set up at first because you have to deal with config files, but once it's set up, it Just Works (TM).

    My little network at my apartment has two windows machines (roommates), my linux machine, and the xbox with XBMC. I can share movies and music across the network and it always works. The xbox and the windows machines can always see shared directories.

    On the other hand, SMB on the windows xp and windows 98SE only works some of the time. I can always count on mine working though.

    Good job, samba team!
    • Ok, I call foul on using "Just Works (tm)" on anything that requires config files.

      The origin of the phrase was to describe how MacOS X is capable of doing pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to do in every circumstance without any configuration. For instance, copy a few cells from Excel and paste them into Photoshop-- it just works. Using Connect To Server and typing in the path to a Windows fileshare-- it just works.

      If you need to use any kind of configuration file, it doesn't Just Work.
      • Poor example there considering the Windows share doesn't work unless you disable connection signing which 2003 has enabled by default.

        I agree with your point about config files but I will take a config file over the automagic approach anyday seeings how it can be a pain in fix automagic apps.

      • True, but in the case of Samba what you would expect it to do is not share anything - I don't want to be sharing my hard disks unless there's a good reason, thank you very much. And the client part does work without any configuration, at least on my distro.

        Finally, SWAT means you just have to fill in a simple form rather than editing a conf file, unless you have a very weird setup. It's not zero work, but it's pretty close.

      • So your computer should guess all by itself what directories you want to share or how do you implement "Just works" with servers?

        Samba config files are really easy to write and the example ones contain all common cases where you just have to put in your paths so yes, it just works after you tell it the info it can't know automagically as long as it doesn't use a mind-reading library.
      • MacOSX "Just Works" when you're doing only what it was *explicitly* designed for. Apple software is very simplistic and does not provide many advanced features last time I checked. Maybe this is a good thing, for some people, but last time I used an OSX desktop (3 weeks ago), I wasn't comfortable, or even capable of doing many things I wanted until I had a terminal open and was ssh'ed back home.
        • Mac OS X uses Samba for its SMB/CIFS connections, and is thus the equal of any Linux distro in terms of connecting to Windows.

          Coming from a Windows or Unix background, it does take a bit of time to get used to Mac OS X and get a good working set of applications, as with any other system. Once you do... the rewards of using OS X far outway the problems, in my circumstances. Your circumstances might dictate otherwise.

          • Re:Samba's great (Score:3, Interesting)

            by BHearsum ( 325814 )
            My issue is that MacOSX apps aren't useful with anything but other MacOSX apps. Details about them are not disclosed, and they use propriatary formats for everything. Two examples:

            1) I needed to read some iChat logs on my Linux machine, there is absolutely *no* app out there that's not OSX specific (why the fuck do you code a log parser in *Aqua*, it's fucking text, jesus), nor could I find any details about the log format (it's binary for christ sake!) so I could whip up a perl script.

            2) As a result of t
      • Mac OS X has a default smb.conf the same as any Linux/etc distribution, a config file - which is REQUIRED for OS X's samba to work, shock! - and in order to edit it for your needs you have to, guess what, customise the configuration file! Whether using a pretty GUI tool, the samba web interface, or using an editor.

        Ranting about how Mac OS X does everything 'without any configuration' is bullshit. Yes, it has much much nicer defaults and much much nicer software for most things, but that doesn't mean you do
    • Just install webmin.. or use swat...
      • I've had bad luck with both of those tools actually. I use KDE's Samba plugin (ksambaplugin) to configure it. Then I'll check the smb.conf file for sanity.

        All those tools do is generate the smb.conf file. They usually work, but not always.

  • Call me when (Score:4, Funny)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:40PM (#11002209) Journal
    Call me when it gets to the Pamela Anderson stage.

  • Why a rewrite? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:42PM (#11002216) Homepage
    For those who don't follow too closely, what necessitated a rewrite of Samba 3 and/or what gains are to be expected?

    • Re:Why a rewrite? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Some of the code base was getting hard to maintain. Fugly so to speak.

    • Re:Why a rewrite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anthony Liguori ( 820979 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:19PM (#11002410) Homepage
      Samba3 is a mess. All the RPC code is hand-written, the SMB parsing logic is all over the place.

      Samba4 automates the generate of most of the RPC code (the numbers change frequently, but it's something like 3,000 lines of IDL now replaces 100,000 lines of handcoded C).

      Plus, Samba3 took the approach of just doing enough of the protocol so that it worked. You'd see a lot of mysterious += 8 where you'd just skip over chunks of the packet. In Samba4, every field is understand and accounted for.

      Samba3 never could have been written as Samba4. Noone knew enough about SMB to understand that Samba4 was needed. This is really just Samba4 growing up.

      The biggest user-visible change is going to be better Active Directory support. Active Directory support in Samba3 is painful. Very painful. If Samba4 does get it's own LDAP server, you may seem some extremely good interop in Samba4.

      • All the RPC code is hand-written

        that is my fault: i started that technique.

        it was better to do it that way at the time because FreeDCE was not available, and even if it was, FreeDCE would have needed quite a lot of additional SKILLED work on it to make it possible to use (http://sf.net/projects/freedce).

        and yet more work to make it production-ready.

        so basically, SEVERAL learning curves had to be breached before anyone could start using (or developing) proper tools for the job.

        people forget that samba
  • Whenever I need to bam up a shared directory in my Windows/Mac/Linux environment at work, samba is quick and easy and free. Good software.

    • Re:Thanks Samba Team (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Vancorps ( 746090 )
      Samba has been my savior on many occasions because of the damn Macs. They don't just handle remote file-systems very well. They never release a file they open. The G5s at my work I often have to boot off because other users are unable to move files around which is part of our workflow process currently so its quite annoying. Samba fixes the problem by acting as my proxy. It talks very nicely to all major network platforms. They've done some nice work this far, Samba 4 looks even more promising.

  • I am Impressed! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They actually made a full implementation of AD Controller (a very difficult thing to do).

    This is really a major acheivement.

    Kudos to the Samba Development

  • And right next to the article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gatesh8r ( 182908 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @02:50PM (#11002267)
    An ad called the "Linux Resource Center: Sponsored by Microsoft". The irony.
  • So basically the Samba team is doing what they believed was too ambtious [samba.org] in 2000, thus leading to the forked Samba - TNG [samba-tng.org] project. Am I correct?

    Judging from the results probably Tridgell & co. were right...

  • non-POSIX backends? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Skiron ( 735617 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:00PM (#11002308)
    I presume this something to do with some Windows functionality?

    I remember reading Andrew Tridgell's comments in 'The Rebel Code' by Glyn Moody - "...And we try to remain bug-for-bug compatible where it makes sense. There are some cases where it doesn't make sense, and their [MS] bugs are just ridiculous, and you shouldn't emulate them. But in most cases, we emulate the bugs so that we interoperate completely with the Microsoft implementation."
    • non-POSIX backends generally refer to backends that sit on storage devices or something like that. The idea is that Window's has a richer file-system model than POSIX (yeah, believe or not, some things are actually designed better in Windows).

      Some non-POSIX storage devices (like for instance, IBM's Storage Tank) have more sophisticated features like snap-shotting that Windows also supports. The idea is to let those features be exposed to Windows clients instead of limiting the feature-set to those that a

  • Easy to install? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DoktorTomoe ( 643004 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:04PM (#11002336)

    Ever tried to add some Redhat servers to a windows domain with user-account given automagically by Active Directory? Tried for 2 days, gave up...

    I certainly hope the configuration is more userfriendly now.

  • Quick remote file ops? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:05PM (#11002337) Homepage
    Any chance that Samba4 will have quick/intelligent remote file operations? By this I mean that I could do the following:
    1. Mount remote-share-drive-A, open A's shared folder as a window in KDE
    2. Mount remote-share-drive-B, open B's shared folder as a window in KDE
    3. Drag the icon for a 1GB file from A's window to B's window
    4. Have the file's data be copied directly from remote-drive-A to remote-drive-B, instead of having it all go (from drive A, over the network, to my client machine, then back over the network again, to drive B)... (which as you can imagine takes forever!)

    • Re:Quick remote file ops? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Vancorps ( 746090 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:16PM (#11002391)
      There is a rather fundimental flaw in your request that Windows could not allow unless it was between two domain controllers. Every resource has its own session key. You would not have the permissions to create a new session key on your remote server since only system and krtg are allowed to do such things.

      My solution is to either use ssh and copy the file from the box, or if the two servers/shares are Windows I use AnalogX TS Drop Copy which does exactly what you ask for.

    • Good question. It would require the SMB protocol to support a serverside local copy operation. And then the userspace software (KDE) needs to know about this option. Samba can't distinguish between a copy and a read/write unless it is told about it.

    • Re:Quick remote file ops? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anthony Liguori ( 820979 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @04:03PM (#11002671) Homepage
      Actually, there is a CopyFile SMB. If it's there, Samba4 supports it. However, the burden really falls to the client here. It depends on how smart KDE would be in using the appropriate SMB's. Samba4's client libraries are much richer than Samba3's so the ability to do this would be exposed to them.

      So, the short answer is yes, but it would require a much more sophisticated client than what you presently see today.
  • I've already given coders the order to embrace this improved version for inclusion into Longhorn.

    I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks for working so hard on this.

    Thanks again!
    Bill Gates

  • Fix LDAP first... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:09PM (#11002358) Journal
    It would be nice if they actually fixed their LDAP code so that it would work with any directory server other than OpenLDAP. The fact of the matter is, I spent the last month trying to get PDC functionality to work with iPlanet Directory Server, and even Netscape Directory Server, which coincidentally Redhat just purchased, and the buggy Samba implementation of LDAP as a storage mechanism for account information just doesn't work with anything other than OpenLDAP. Users on a Windows XP workstation can't authenticate, and sometimes they can authenticate by the XP client gets a BSOD right after authenticating. It's bizzare, it's actually as if Samba is sending the XP client a buffer overflow while authenticating. If someone can prove me wrong I would be happy to hear it.

    I spent weeks working with RHEL technical support, and even had one of the Redhat support techs rebuild my environment, and sure enough, his users can't authenticate either (and experience the same BSOD).

    I'd love to be able to replace my entire Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux, but until Samba can actually provide a backup domain controller functionality that works with our existing LDAP infrastructure, I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.

    Can you believe the only workable enterprise-level solution for Samba is to make the Samba server a domain member of an Active Directory domain? And then you still have to purchase Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs) for all of your workstations, saving you $0!!! (Not to mention your RHEL license and support fees which are more expensive than Windows 2003 Server)....

    Fucking ridiculous... If I sound a little pissed off it's because I wasted a month of my time trying to get this buggy software to work properly and even Redhat enterprise support just threw up their hands and said: Sorry, it's not supported and doesn't work.
    • I'd love to be able to replace my entire Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux, but until Samba can actually provide a backup domain controller functionality that works with our existing LDAP infrastructure, I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.

      Samba supports PDC/BDC functionality. You can have has many BDC's as you want. I have a PDC and a BDC installed. It works fine. I'm using OpenLDAP thou

      • Re:Fix LDAP first... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ink ( 4325 ) * on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:42PM (#11002545) Homepage
        BTW, does Windows Server support any LDAP back-end that is not Microsoft's Active directory?

        Shhhhhh. Microsoft doesn't have to work with 3rd parties; the 3rd parties are responsible for reverse-engineering Windows and working perfectly with every possible combination that an end user may choose. And, god forbid anyone track down the bugs with iPlanet and fix them... it's much more efficient to complain about it on Slashdot.

        FWIW, we have PDC/BDC witih Samba3; and we previously used a 'hot standby' Samba2 server in a PDC/coldPDC configuration. Samba is incredible; we love it. We're even using <gasp> OpenLDAP with Samba3 right now. It plugs in with Squirrelmail, Courier, Exim, Apache, Tomcat, Coldfusion, and a buch of custom applications. Oh, and I also wrote a Samba-to-fax gateway that doesn't require any Windows programs to work (and works from any OS). It's a verah niiice.

    • Re:Fix LDAP first... (Score:2, Informative)

      by nfsilkey ( 652484 )
      I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.

      Well, if you looked a bit deeper into FMSO roles and AD, you would see that Windows has a glaring SPOF also. Youre box responsible for the Global Catalog is NOT the one you dont want to lose.

    • Re:Fix LDAP first... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anthony Liguori ( 820979 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:58PM (#11002635) Homepage
      It would be nice if they actually fixed their LDAP code so that it would work with any directory server other than OpenLDAP.

      It does. We routinely run it with IBM Directory Server.

      and the buggy Samba implementation of LDAP as a storage mechanism for account information just doesn't work with anything other than OpenLDAP.

      Were you linking against iPlanet LDAP libs or OpenLDAP libs? It's quite possible that you're linking against the OpenLDAP libs and that they're not getting along with iPlanet.

      Samba only uses the standard LDAP calls. Other than the schema extensions (which unfortunately aren't in a standardized format) there's no LDAP-platform dependence.

      It's bizzare, it's actually as if Samba is sending the XP client a buffer overflow while authenticating.

      Why haven't you submitted this as a bug report at samba.org?

      I spent weeks working with RHEL technical support,

      Grab the latest from samba.org. The RHEL packages are sometimes quite old.

      I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time.

      It's good that you made this decision for the world. Since noone's actually using Samba in production environments right now.

      Look, Samba's used in a lot of enterprise environments. You're experience isn't the norm. You're environment also isn't the norm. Not many folks use iPlanet. Netscape's DS is also considered one of the lesser LDAP servers out there.

      If this is a reproducable bug, and of the severity you describe, and is still present in the latest version of Samba, it's certainly be a high priority fix.

      Keep in mind though, we don't do a lot of testing with things like iPlanet because we don't have access to copies of it. OpenLDAP and IDS get a lot of testing with Samba because people who work on Samba have ready access to it.

      What's more, I don't see a single way in which any kind of LDAP failure could result in Samba sending an incorrect packet (with an incorrectly sized buffer) to a Windows client.

      Bugzilla [samba.org] is your friend.

      • Re:Fix LDAP first... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by illumin8 ( 148082 )
        Were you linking against iPlanet LDAP libs or OpenLDAP libs? It's quite possible that you're linking against the OpenLDAP libs and that they're not getting along with iPlanet.

        Samba only uses the standard LDAP calls. Other than the schema extensions (which unfortunately aren't in a standardized format) there's no LDAP-platform dependence.

        Well, you see, that's the problem... Management refuses to let me implement a solution that's not supported, and as soon as I go and compile Samba custom, I lose the abi
        • > if it turns out the problem is Samba was built linked against the
          > OpenLDAP libs instead of iPlanet libs

          You wouldn't be the first person to do this.

          Anyhow, "ldd <binary>" will list exactly which (shared) libraries a given binary has been linked against.

    • Re:Fix LDAP first... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by runenfool ( 503 )
      Samba 3 does work with whatever Sun is calling their directory these days (I get confused ;) ). Ive got it running myself actually, as a PDC. Granted, the directory is on the same box as the samba software, which is admittedly different than what you have (for one Im not even using Linux in this case) - but it works.

      On the other hand I will tell you that its just easier to get it working with OpenLDAP because thats what they test with. Using the Sun directory on Solaris/SPARC is quite a bit harder to se

  • Implementing Microsoft "Standards" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spencerogden ( 49254 ) <spencer@spencerogden.com> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:34PM (#11002489) Homepage
    What is truly amazing about the Samba project is their consistent ability to emulate MS screw up, go "buf for bug" is the term I think is used. To implement something like Active Directory, bugs and, which included 4 or 5 different standard (but not quite) services is amazing. Just look at the problems with write support for NTFS. I don't know if its intentional, but MS products are not exactly easy to reverse engineer. Thanks, release us from the horror that is AD on XP!

    • Re:Implementing Microsoft "Standards" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JohnnyKlunk ( 568221 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:51PM (#11002589)
      OK, I know it's popular to bash MS here, but precisely what is the the horror that is AD on XP? Like MS or not if you've got x thousand users needing shared file/print resources across multiple servers / sites then AD with XP does a pretty reasonable job. It's easy to administer, easy for users to understand and the flexibility of clever combinations of site / ou / group based policies give a level of intuitive usability that very little else will provide.

      Bash MS all you like. I dont like alot of their stuff either, just give some evidence for the stuff you dislike and admit to the stuff they do well.

  • Risky guy! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:54PM (#11002612) Homepage
    FTA: "Samba4 reached an important milestone tonight, as I installed it for my wife to use as her file server for all of her important documents, email, the book she is working on etc."

    Ok, there are two rules I follow:
    1. Never touch a running system.
    but even more importantly:
    2. Never touch the running system of your girlfriend/wife.

    I did that a few weeks ago and upgraded her machine. Due to bad luck I bought a faulty RAM module and "thought" I had double checked it. Well, long story short, I got her machine ready in time for her finals but I went through a lot of absolutely unnecessery trouble. Ok, now she's happy and all but I nearly failed it. I would never ever try my development code on her productive box.

    • No matter how you try to explain to the significant other (SO) that it wasn't your fault (i.e. buggy RAM, bad OS, or what not), they'd never believe it. Good advice, especially if you want to keep your GF.

    • ...try my development code on her productive box.

      Whew! Yer darn lucky it was only on instead of in, otherwise it might be a reproductive box!!

      (Oh, and be sure to test that code throughly - girls don't like bugs anywhere near their boxes...!)

  • Why promote a standard that encourages MS lockin? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @03:58PM (#11002639) Journal
    I would prefer to see NDS implementations and Novell server integrations than to give MS the fuel to convince IT that Windows is the way to go since Unix only works with AD.

  • I'm not quite sure why this story is in the Linux Slashdot category. Yes, the story is on Linux Today, but Samba runs on pretty much any *nix platform. (It wouldn't even surprise me if it ran on win32 under cygwin. That would be a bit wierd, but ...)

    The BSD and Apple categories would be just as appropriate. Perhaps Slashdot needs a *nix category ...

  • Stages (Score:3, Funny)

    by thomasj ( 36355 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @06:07PM (#11003443) Homepage
    So these are the stages of Samba versions:
    • Andrew: There is a branch tag. Some lines of code has been written, and it can print the word "Samba" in a log file
    • Susan: Core things work. That is, you can see a share folder, and when MS-Word crashes, it is not clear, if it is the Samba pile that caused it
    • Alpha: Susan threw it out! Andrew is now pestering his paying customers to use it. Status is: what works, works. Features are missing (like reading from files)
    • Beta: Paying customers threw it out! Andrew is seeking the Linux distributors to try it out.
    • Distro: Some advanced stuff doesn't come out right. The distributors release it anyhow in the hope that some geek will fix it.
    • Limbo: The geek fixed it and made an obscure backdoor. He is now using your host for compiling his kernel
    • Retro: Most people revert to an earlier version, with a better backdoor. The geek has now a nextdoor neighbor geek to compile X on the host
    • Fiasco: Well, yeah. Your drop Windows service.
    Sorry, got a bit carried away...

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