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Linux Software

Samba 2.2.0 Released 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the look-what-we-got-kiddies dept.
Jeremy Allison wrote in to tell us that Samba 2.2.0 has been released. Of course, I'm sure everyone reading this knows what that means already, so I've attached the press release. Mostly this looks like its stuff for compatibility with Windows "We just changed enough to break everyone else" 2000's implementation of the protocol. Congrats to everyone involved with what is unquesitonably among the most important server apps on Linux.

Samba 2.2.0 - Powering the next generation of Network Attached Storage.

17 April 2001.

The Samba Team is proud to announce a new major release of Samba, version 2.2.0. This release includes significant feature enhancements for Samba, and sets the standard for UNIX® and Microsoft Windows® integration.

Enhancements include :

oIntegration of server terminated leases (Windows "oplocks") with UNIX NFS sharing (Linux 2.4 kernel and IRIX only). Complete data and locking integrity when sharing files between UNIX and Windows.

oAbility to act as an authentication source for Windows 2000® and Windows NT® clients, allowing savings on the purchase of Microsoft® Client Access Licenses.

oFull support for the automatic downloading of Windows 2000 and Windows NT printer drivers, providing the first full implementation of the Windows NT point-and-print functionality independent of Microsoft code.

oUnification of Windows 2000 and Windows NT Access control lists (ACLs) with UNIX Access control lists. Allow Windows clients to directly manipulate UNIX Access control entries as though they were Windows ACLs.

oSingle sign-on integration using the winbind server (available separately). Allow UNIX servers to use Windows 2000 and Windows NT Domain controllers as a user and group account server. Manage all user and group accounts from a single source.

oMicrosoft Distributed File System® (DFS) support. Samba 2.2.0 can act as a DFS server in a Microsoft network.

oShare level security setting. Allow security on Samba shares to be set by Microsoft client tools.

oMany other feature enhancements and bug fixes.

About Samba

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software implementation of the Microsoft CIFS/SMB protocols for UNIX systems. In development for ten years, Samba is considered to be the reference implementation of the CIFS/SMB protocol for UNIX systems. Samba test tools are used by all the CIFS/SMB vendors to test and fix their protocol implementations.

Samba is currently used in Network attached storage (NAS) and other products from the following vendors (Note: this does not imply endorsement by these vendors, please contact the vendor marketing departments separately for comments).

IBM®, SGI® (Samba for IRIX), Sun Microsystems ®(Cobalt Qube), Hewlett Packard® (CIFS/9000), VERITAS®, VA Linux Systems®, REALM Information Technologies ®, Network Concierge®, Procom ® and many others.

In addition, Samba is shipped as a standard part of Linux® offerings from Linux vendors such as Red Hat®, Caldera®, SuSE®, Mandrake®, TurboLinux ® and others.

Samba is being used worldwide to solve the problem of integrating hetrogeneous networks by corporations such as Agilent Technologies ®, CISCO Systems ®, and many others in addition to educational establishments and individuals

Best of all Samba is an Open Source/Free software project, available under the GNU GPL license meaning that source code for Samba is freely available for anyone to modify and customize.

Code from the Samba Team and individuals around the world has been integrated and tested to create Samba. In addition the following corporations have made significant donations of code, effort, testing facilities and support to make this release possible :

Linuxcare (now TurboLinux), VA Linux Systems, Caldera, SGI, Hewlett Packard, VERITAS, IBM.

This new release may be downloaded from our Web site at :

http://www.samba.org

For press enquiries about this release please contact either Jeremy Allison (jra@samba.org), Andrew Tridgell (tridge@samba.org) or John Terpstra (jht@samba.org).

Samba - the SOURCE for Windows Networking !

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Samba 2.2.0 Released More

Samba 2.2.0 Released

Comments Filter:

  • Cost (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Although Samba may be free, the skill and effort required to install and configure it is not. You have to consider the cost of employing someone with the required skills to do this versus the cost of a Windows license and a windows installation. Windows supports unattended installations which can be initiated with little or no effort, provided the configuration settings are correctly specified.

  • Re:new section (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, and for once with colors that don't make you feel like puking.

  • Gosh, isn't it a UNIX app? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Congrats to everyone involved with what is
    unquesitonably among the most important server apps on Linux.

    And here all this time I thought it was an important UNIX application. Oh, look. So do the authors of SAMBA.

    I'm sure your corporate masters at the Open Source Developers Network love your attention to the ideals of pimping GNU/Linux.

  • Wha? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Mostly this looks like its stuff for compatibility with Windows."

    Umm...no shit. Isn't that the purpose of Samba?
  • I'm a bit less sure than that. PostgreSQL is very good, but it's not exactly in class with Oracle (at least, 7.0 wasn't -- I just installed 7.1 today, so I really can't comment on the changes). Anyhow, even presuming that it is ready for the title, PostgreSQL only became enterprise-ready much more recently than either Apache or Samba.
  • I'm really not sure of that. Everywhere I've deployed samba (mostly schools but a business or two as well), they cared about licenses quite a bit.
  • The theory is you boot one of these computers, during the boot up you press F8, you are prompted for a user name & password, then the an OS image is TFTPed to the local machine.

    Gee, that sounds alot like my experience installing Debian GNU/Linux on a 9 year-old Sun Sparcstation LX. I just had to setup bootp and tftp, download the tftp image and a couple others from the debian site. It started up, got its ip address, sucked down the boot image and booted it. Then it kept me up till after 5am in the morning while it downloaded packages through the masqueraded internet connection. It took me a couple of times to get the TFTP image to load (wrong name), but everything else went very smoothly.

    Oh how I now wish that PCs had something like the OpenBoot Prompt. The BIOS's in current PCs are downright primitive. Very little has changed in the last 15-odd years. It's pathetic.

    I wonder how long until M$ trumpets this as their next great "innovation"...

  • add, Enhydra also.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • onlawn:"Here, you can have mine..."
    phutureboy:"But that [karma] took 81 years to earn!"
    onlawn:"That's okay, I don't need it much any more"

    (disclaimer, I have it wrong so anyone who can give a better trascript feel free to do so...)



    ~^~~^~^^~~^

  • Flamebait (Score:3)

    by On Lawn ( 1073 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @02:12PM (#284764) Journal
    one man's flame is another man's fire...

    His comments would have been more tempered if he said "environment they are used to" instead of "more stable, [yada]".

    But that wouldn't be saying anything different.

    /me ducks

    Seriously though, having moved from a Linux environment to a Windows recently, I can attest that Windows is more stable these days than it was. But check this out, I just had to visit a company yesterday that I installed a samba server in over a year and a half ago.

    I had never had to visit them since the time I installed it, until now that they are having hardware problems with the case its housed in. They aren't Linux gurus so I can attest that they haven't touched it.

    I wonder if anyone can say they have a NT box in a production commercial environment that they haven't had to touch in 18 months, nay not even a reboot.

    On my linux box at home, if my wife does something strange, like run tuxracer even though we don't have 3d acceloration, I can log in from work and fix it for her, while she is logged in and without stepping on what she is doing.

    I know there is remote admin tools for NT and 2000, but honestly, they aren't as powerful and/or they interupt what the user is doing.

    So, I hope this is more insiteful and evenhanded, but I don't need any more karma.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • I compiled it last night on Solaris 7, and it was a nice, clean build. Good work, guys!
  • Have you ever seen an M$ PDC replicate?

    All I know is when my former boss decided that NT was the way to go, one day we had just one NT machine and next week there were about 8 of them.

    Something was replicating!!! :)

  • Re:Cost (Score:2)

    by jnik ( 1733 )
    An interesting (and important) point, but ultimately a little off. Most linux distros also support unattended installation, but how many file servers do you really need? SAMBA being a primarily server-side app, it doesn't make much sense to do automated installs.
    On top of that, administering a Windows network takes time, skill, and education, just as much as a UNIX network. MS talks about lower TCO if you just buy Windows, but that hasn't been borne out at my job.
  • they will change the License for W2K cals.

    They did the same thing when puting fast track or web site pro web server on NT Workstation was cheaper than getting NT Server + IIS for 'free'. They changed NT Worstation licence to say you couldn't have more than 10 tcp/ip clients at a time.

    doh, that's what's driving WinXP.

    -Peace
    Dave

  • Def Leppard and Judas Priest, though: That impresses me.

    While I agree with the sentiment, I should point out that Judas Priest are from Birmingham. You could have had Bruce Dickinson, though.

  • Since we're all in a group hug now :-)

    We (at work) have been using Samba for over a year now to serve a small workgroup of NT users. None of us (least of all me, the default sysadmin) are experienced NT or Windows users.

    We recently switched our main server from an old (10 years?) SGI Indigo2 XL to a new Dell server - Samba 2.0.6 to 2.0.7. The process of compiling, installing and configuring Samba was straightforward and I can safely say that Samba is one of the most impressive and useful pieces of software I have ever used. Well done and many thanks to all responsible!

    I should also put in a good word for O'Reilly for allowing the free distribution of the 'Using Samba' book - invaluable.

    Maintaining mixed unix/NT can be a real chore (and I won't even mention Clearcase), but Samba has made it work beautifully. It's a pity that we also ended up with a Syntax TAS (Totalnet Advanced Server) system - purely for Clearcase ... it 'works' (well, actually it does), 'guaranteed support', 'recommended' ... :-/

    At some point in the future, when I have time, I'd like to shift Clearcase, and it's SMB appendage TAS, to a Linux/Samba server - just to show it can be done. Then I could get rid of the Ultra5! Which would make me very happy :-)

    Now if only there was an easy/cheap way to manage unix and NT users/groups from a unix machine, minus any NT server ofcourse.

    Cheers!

    --
    Alastair
    London UK

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by Malor ( 3658 )
    well yes, but the admin is $90K PER YEAR -- in theory, at least for now, the $40K is a once-off expense. And from a business perspective, spending $40K to save $40K/year makes excellent sense.

    Flip side of the coin is that the $90K guy is probably going to be able to do a hell of a lot more than just basic administration. Whether or not this is worth it to a given company will mostly depend on whether they see IT as a strategic asset or as a cost center.

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by Malor ( 3658 )
    heh, I'm kind of arguing out of both sides of my mouth here.

    My general experience with M$ versus Unix is that it takes four times as long to solve something in Unix, but once it's solved it's done and you never have to touch it again. With M$, you generally pay a lot more up front in licensing (compared to the free Unices), and you also pay a lot more in ongoing maintenance as stuff mysteriously breaks. If you need the services up instantly, use Windows. If you have some time to twiddle and a talented person to do the twiddling, Unix may be a better bet.

    For the dotcoms, that were all about flash and sizzle, Windows made a lot of sense. For the companies who are in it for the long haul, I tend to think that Unix is a better solution a lot of the time. Probably the single most important factor is the overall skill level of the IT staff, with the caveat that if you don't push them a little they're not improving as fast as they might be. (note I said a LITTLE. :-) )

    As an aside, W2K does seems substantially better than NT, but still not as good as Unix.
  • Aside from finishing the PDC/BDC implementation, what else is needed for Samba to completely replace Redmond's implementations?

    (You know, the Samba guys have done a wonderful job simply because I have to ask this question. Everything remaining is probably just niggling details.)

    --

  • Pam_smb is good (we used it at my old work to save an extra password; we used Samba to share files from Unix to NT and didn't want another password), but you do have to create a Unix user (eg, under NIS) as it needs that information for home directory, uid, gid etc.

    Winbind sounds like it's the solution to that problem...
    --

  • The M1 bridge over Meadowhall impreses me. I'm impressed it hasn't fallen down yet.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • But that's not the point of Samba. Want directory services ? Use OpenLDAP. Want Kerberos ? Use MIT Kerb5 or Heimdal. Want DNS ? Use bind. Want DHCP ? Use a dhcp daemon (University of Washington I think). Want Terminal Services ? Use X, or vnc.

    Are you getting the picture ? :-).

    You're comparing Samba, which is just the Windows file/print/authentication service for Windows clients on UNIX, with an entire Win2k/NT load.

    You should be comparing a full UNIX/Linux distro. containing Samba to do a fair comparison.

    Regards,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.
  • Check out sybase tools. MS-SQL server is wire compatible with Sybase (it uses TDS - Tabular Data Stream protocol. Proprietary though :-( ).

    Standard Linux sybase tools should talk to SQL server no problem (at least they used to). I depended on this in a previous life :-).

    Regards,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.
  • I remember aquaplaning on that bloody thing. Nearly killed me :-). God I *hate* driving on the M1....

    Have they knocked down the cooling towers yet ?
    :-).

    Jeremy.
  • Ah. You must be a southern git then :-).

    Jeremy.
  • Already included in the 2.2.0 Samba. Look for the nsswitch "wins" module. I forgot to mention it (we've addeda *lot* of stuff :-).

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

    BTW: I just uploaded the Red Hat rpms for 2.2.0 for Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0 intel onto samba.org.
  • Oh - a black pudding muncher..... :-). We'll, we all have our crosses to bear... :-).

    Jeremy.

  • Re:Aussies (Score:3)

    by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:18PM (#284783) Homepage
    I'm not a bloody Aussie, I've never even *been* to bloody Australia :-). I'm from *Sheffield* (where they do "the Full Monty" :-) :-).

    You're thinking of *Andrew*. He's a bloody Aussie !

    Bloody foreigners, not knowing the difference between Australia and the UK, I dunno... mumble, grumble....

    :-).

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  • Re:Why this is tremendous... (Score:3)

    by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:21PM (#284784) Homepage
    This is why winbind is so useful for creating Samba appliances. No more local users or groups, just drop the thing into the NT domain and go....

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.
  • Actually, the line I use when developing Samba is :

    -Wall -Wshadow -Wstrict-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-qual

    to get *really* medieval on the code... (with apologies to "Pulp Fiction" :-) :-). Plus we run Samba though the IRIX compiler (which is also very, very picky....).

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  • Re:Point and click printing (Score:4)

    by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @05:15PM (#284786) Homepage
    A "braindamage implementation issue" is a printer driver server design that expects to be able to run printer driver binaries *ON THE SERVER THAT IS SERVING THEM OUT TO CLIENTS*. If you think back to the dim and distant past, when NT ran on other things than an Intel CPU then you'll realize how broken this is.....

    Of course that's been fixed by that "portable" OS, Windows 2000 :-).

    As Samba runs on other things than x86 boxes this is braindamage for us...

    Regards,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  • Re:"authentication source"? (Score:5)

    by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:01PM (#284787) Homepage
    It means it's not completely a PDC, 'cos it doesn't do replication or BDC Stuff yet - but it works well enough to put Windows 2000 or Windows NT clients into a Samba hosted domain, and have people log in and authenticate against it, and download profiles from it.

    For many small sites this is all they need - not the full PDC stuff.

    That's why I didn't say PDC, but used the phrase "authentication source".

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  • Re:Point and click printing (Score:5)

    by Jeremy Allison - Sam ( 8157 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:22PM (#284788) Homepage
    9x clients were already supported by the 2.0.x codebase. They're also supported in the same way that W2k/NT servers do it in this new release.

    I didn't mention it 'cos we already had that functionality - so it wasn't news :-).

    We've now got a *complete* (modulo bugs and one braindamage implementation issue, hang out on samba-technical@samba.org for details) implementation of W2k/NT point and print. That *includes* W9x driver download.

    Cheers,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by kraig ( 8821 )
    as edinho said, it isn't really a one-off cost. It's a one-off cost every several years. While businesses who're able to pay admins $90k, or pay $40k for licenses, tend to be a bit more conservative with adopting new technology (our own IT department is still looking at Win2k, for example), eventually they do adopt the new stuff (mainly because MS gives them no choice - support for older platforms is dropped).

    And yeah, most $90k admins are generally able to do more than just admin - they typically have programming skills as well. (However, you don't want to hand over an integral part of your programming effort to an admin who may be called away at a moment's notice to deal with a haxx0r attack.)

  • Re:Cost (Score:2)

    by kraig ( 8821 )

    ditto.

    YES, it takes more time (generally) to set up something under *nix than it does similar Windows services. However, would you rather put your budget into hiring a $90k admin who knows what s/he's doing, or into hiring a $50k admin who may or may not + $40k for licenses?
  • Praise the Lord, and Jeremy Allison. I just hope MS doesn't screw things up again. Samba is one of the best things to happen to Linux servers. I've personally been able to circumvent the purchase of 3 MS NT/2000 Servers because of the Samba team's good work and my personal propaganda.

    Thanks.

  • Jesus, what an arsehole.
  • Your just jealous us colonials beat you at the cricket and rugby now days (and we're working on the soccer) :) Allowances must be made for Americans.

    Much prefered "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" myself. Not made in Sheffield but still bloody funny.

    Anyway, keep up the good work.
  • Did samba 2.0.x not do this, though? I'm sure I had my win2k professional machine at home logging into a samba-controlled domain. I'm running 2.2.0a2 now, and it works sweet =). I guess I'll have to upgrade now. ;p

    I've also used 2.0.7 to move a novell netware server at work over to linux, handling domain logons from 5 or so client machines, and serving cds, etc. these are only win98 machines, though.

    The only problem I've had with it though, is occasionally the client machines will say the password has been rejected. If I look in the samba log, it has 'connection reset by peer' mesages. I've searched on google, and have found other people with the same problem, but no solution. Has this been fixed in 2.2?

    Cheers =)
  • o Ability to act as an authentication source for Windows 2000® and Windows NT® clients, allowing savings on the purchase of Microsoft® Client Access Licenses.

    Can someone explain this? Does this version of Samba in essence emulate Microsoft's licensing agent, allowing free use of features that Microsoft wants you to pay for, or does this mean something else?

    Sounds like something that could result in a tidal wave of lawsuits from Redmond.

  • Re:"authentication source"? (Score:3)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @02:40PM (#284796)
    Someone needs to make an XBOX DVD with a ready-to-run SAMBA server on it. Pay $300.00, Plug XBOX into network, insert DVD, cancel
    order for NT server.
  • Win 2k is rigged to get you to use NTFS permissions exclusively to regulate access (Microsoft texts tell you to just give the Everybody group Full Control permissions)

    I'm curious about that. You aren't supposed to use share-level permissions anymore? They still work fine (and are easier for the newbie).
    --
  • I'd guess doing that means that effective rights don't need to be computed for each file, making it slightly more efficent. Meaning that normally, share perms are probably just fine.

    Real typical MCSE fodder, BTW (was one in a past life): Do This, Never Mind Why, Never mind when you shouldn't do this.
    --
  • Breaking implementation would help MS because it would prevent people from buying non MS products.

    Note that Microsoft itself has got several implementations of the protocol -- everything from Windows For Workgroups to DOS to OS/2 to earlier versions of NT to Win 95/98 to "LanMan For Unix" are all slightly different. And they have promised to support these patforms.

    They probably can't break Samba without accidentally pissing on their own customers (enterprise customers that is, they'll piss on you home users all they want but if tye). That is, unless they spent a large amount of time trying to find the exact breakage that applys to Samba and not any other SMB product.

    The only thing that they probably really dislike is the PDC-emulation. Expect that to break (OS/2's PDC functionality on a NT network broke a long time ago). Solution: Keep your PDC on NT unless you are prepared to face the consequenses. Real Solution: Use something like NFS instead of a proprietary protocol.
    --
  • one of the SAMBA team lives @ SGI

    XFS i hope will be in the kernel soon
    (please linus )

    intresting though is SGI released their trusted IRIX stuff and want a trusted linux

    hope this does not clash with NSA stuff
    (finaly the NSA doing their job of protecting people(US))

    but how long are we going to have to wait until I can ditch my solaris boxen and say to the boss yes this is secure and supported AND from a company with nice PR people to keep him happy ?

    regards

    john jones

  • Interesting my ass.

    > Although Samba may be free, the skill and effort required to install and configure it is not.
    Bah.

    cd /usr/src
    curl http://us1.samba.org/samba/ftp/samba-latest.tar.gz > ./samba-latest.tar.gz
    tar -xvzf ./samba-latest.tgz
    cd samba-2.2.0/source
    ./configure
    make install
    /usr/local/samba/bin/swat &
    and voila! nice preety gui for dem winders foks

    As for the ease of configuring Windows, sure, it's real easy to set up. Badly. Tell me, are these inexpensive employees who can't install Samba going to be able to tell you if you're exposing the IPC$ share to the world? If you're allowing case-insensitive LANMAN passwords? Sounds like the guys running Microsoft's routers.
    Not even going to comment on the 'supports unattended installations...provided the configuration settings are correctly specified.'
  • Why exactly was this assinine comment modded to 2? What crack-smoking moderator made the decision to mod this to 2?

    Remember, only a fool makes a comment such as yours. A true master offers guidance and encouragement to an obvious newbie, in the hope that a new master shall one day emerge.

  • Use an automounter. Most modern distros (such as Mandrake 7.2, RedHat 6.x, etc.) include one.

    Non root users can mount SMB shares all day long. The old smbmnt isn't needed...the new smbmount is called by the mount command ... the automounter runs as root, so there is no need to give users a SUID binary.
  • Yes, it was 10 CALs, not 5. Sorry, my mistake.
  • Windows clients typically authenticate against an Windows Server (be it NT4 or 2000). Each individual client connecting to the Server must have a Client Access License (CAL). Windows 2000 Server comes bundled with 5 CALs, and Windows 2000 Advanced Server comes with 25 CALs. Additional CALs can be purchased seperately. The important point is that CALs are only required if you want to connect to a Windows NT4/2000 Server.

    For example, if you plan on having a network of 20 Windows 2000 Professional workstations connected to a single Windows 2000 Server, in addition to the 20 licenses for Windows 2000 Professional and 1 copy of Windows 2000 Server, you would need to purchase an additional 15 CALs.

    By providing you with free server software, Samba eliminates the need to purchase CALs, as they are server-specific. In the above example, the customer would only need the 20 Windows 2000 Professional licenses.

    WiPEOUT
  • You are hopeless
  • we're just US'ians. and y'all talk funny, so y'all must be from the same place. right? :)

  • ACLs on Linux need patch. (Score:3)

    by eMBee ( 27441 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @12:49PM (#284808) Homepage
    Unification of Windows 2000 and Windows NT Access control lists (ACLs) with UNIX Access control lists. Allow Windows clients to directly manipulate UNIX Access control entries as though they were Windows ACLs.
    to make this work on linux you need to apply the ACL patches [bestbits.at] to your kernel.

    greetings, eMBee.
    --

  • This might be a stupid (inexperienced question), but am I the only one who thinks it would be very useful to have Linux's hostname resolving scheme support Netbios name resolution? e.g. to be able to specify for example in /etc/host.conf something like "order hosts, netbios, bind" or something like that. So that typing (for example) "ping foo" would allow for a Netbios-named PC on the LAN called "foo"'s IP to be found, if it isn't in /etc/hosts, for example. We have a WinNT DHCP server on the LAN, and a Linux server that does some other stuff, and entirely Windows clients, so the Windows clients all get "random" IP addresses on startup. It's a pain to keep /etc/hosts up to date under this scheme, and its also a pain to use IP reservations for every client.

    Apart from this probably esoteric setup, I'm sure there are many other possible useful applications for this to be supported (e.g. to recreate something like Windows Network Neighbourhood - how does the new KDE do this?). Seems to me "Linux as a workstation" could benefit seriously from this. You don't really want to be going around explaining the "smbclient" command parameters to every employee - in Windows this stuff "just works, point and click", at least from a user perspective.

    Is something like this planned? Is it something that would perhaps be easier to support with the planned LibSMB?

    Is this already possible and I just don't know how (or haven't tried recently)? Admittedly its been at least 6 months to a year since I last looked at this stuff. Sorry if it's a stupid question.

    -----

  • Tried the unix ODBC clients? Specifically, perl's DBI driver: DBD::ODBC?

    Should do the trick.
  • Let's see, you're a company with 60 Windows 2000 Servers in multiple departments scattered around the world. What would you rather have, the management of dealing with server-based concurrency licenses for each server (gee, does this server have 25 or 10 or 5?) or simply buying a CAL for every client you have, and just buying your 60 server licenses?

    However you've simply replaced dealing with server based licences with complexities of client based licencing.
    The approach of just buying one for each client is fine so long as your network were never to change after that. It's all too possible for someone to forget the CAL with a new machine. Also are they technically transferable? IIRC you need different CAL's for NT4 and 2000 too.
    Let alone that both methods are pure money making schemes of software companies. With a per server setup there is at least the possibility that different numbers of licences could actually alter the way things work.
  • SAMBA will provide the most basic of directory services. Nothing like what NDS or Active Directory provide. Not to mention the other native services that Windows 2000 provides that Samba doesn't (IIS, RRAS, Media Services, Terminal Services, DHCP, DNS, PKI, etc.)

    Because it dosn't need to. Samba is written primarily for unix, which takes a modular aproach, unlike the Windows "plate of sphagetti" design.
    For most of the list you have a quite a choice which program to use, with some things such as MTA, you have a huge choice.

  • Re:Cost (Score:2)

    by mpe ( 36238 )
    You have to consider the cost of employing someone with the required skills to do this versus the cost of a Windows license and a windows installation.

    You still need a skilled person to install Windows. Especially given the kind of documentation MS puts out.

    Windows supports unattended installations which can be initiated with little or no effort, provided the configuration settings are correctly specified.

    However it can take a lot of effort to get these configurations right in the first place. As well as messy mistakes to clean up if they are wrong.
    Also how do you get any version of NT to automatically create user shares. Do you know that NT automatically shares it's whole filesystem, by default too. In most cases you don't want this.
  • The problem RIS solves is how to make installing an OS image (inluding applications)

    The "including applications" can also be interpeted as "Windows can't cope with having it's apps on a network drive very well" :)

    So when a user messes up their PC,

    So even with Windows 2000 the end user can still mess with things only the admin should really be able to touch?
    If something the user did means you have to reinstall the whole OS then something is seriously broken somewhere.
  • Run cat /etc/passwd | mksmbpasswd.sh > /etc/smbpasswd

    This might work on the simplist of setups. But it dosn't scale to many servers using NIS. Which is an area where the samba docs are unclear.
  • It always boggles my mind when people advertise their ineptitude, stupidity or ignorance to the whole world. People would be embarrased to say 'I don't know how to read or write" but they seem downright proud of themselves when they say "I can't do math" or "I can't set up a simple thinng like samba".

    If you are dumb keep it to yourself maybe we won't notice.
  • In some ways it's not oracle but in other ways it's better then oracle. It's missing some "enterprise" features like clustering, replication etc but it does have unlimited row sizes, a fantastic rule system, user loadable languages and my fave being able to define your own operators and aggregate functions. Once you use one of these things you will scratch your head and ask why anybody would pay a hundred thousand dollars for a database that does not do it. OTOH if you really need those enterprise features you could probably pay for them. For anybody else it's like butter.
  • freetds is a good effort but it's not suitable for mission critical web sites.
  • tds support in sql7 is a bit flaky and worse in w2K. MS is going to ditch TDS support soon because they don't like the fact you can connect to sql server from linux/apacha/php (plays nice with others!). They want to force you to use windows and ODBC/ADO/OLEDB or whatever their alphabet soup of data access technology of the day is.
  • you still need unix ODBC drivers. Perl's DBI uses freetds so unless you want to pay for an ODBC deriver from merant (thousands of dollars!) you are screwed (freetds is not mission critical).
  • " It would be very hard for them to change something and not have it affect a lot of implementations. "

    why would it be hard for them? Breaking implementation would help MS because it would prevent people from buying non MS products. MS has a history of backstabbing companies that it partnered with. Did they all find god all of a sudden or something?
  • Hey but I can set up samba in under 30 minutes!
  • Anybody familiar with Goldmine contact management software?

    We had it running on NT for about a year and a half. It served a consistent 70-73 records/sec. The server needed to reboot at least 3-4 times per week. The Goldmine clients recieved "blob" errors (dbf) at least once, usually twice, a day.

    Since the software is just served up to the Windows clients and run there, I decided to move it to a Samba server. I installed 2.0.7, made it the PDC, and also enabled wins resolution. Hey, cool, three birds with one stone...

    That server has been up for 38 days, 16 hours with *no* problems *at all*. Add to that, I get at least 170 records/sec, up to 400/sec at times. That translates to everyone being happy.

    Thanks to the Samba team!

  • It is really nice to see that Samba is getting a lot closer to a real Windows NT server! I have been using Samba 2.0.7 where I work and it has worked very well (although we don't have a lot of people using it, but it works).

    DFS is a really nice feature to have, since a sysadmin can create a single SMB share that links to all of the other network shares... less to remember and less support calls like, ``where's such-and-such folder again?''.

    Also being able to edit the ACL directly from a Windows NT/2000 workstation is nice... probably won't have to do a lot of chown/chmod-ing again :)
  • So you consider installing something like Client Services for Netware a rare occasion? Reboots should be used only for hardware and kernel upgrades/patches.
  • Jeremy,

    I know this will happen `when its done', but what's the currentstatus of BDC / PDC functionality (inc. replication). What's a credible date to think that Samba should be capable of this? Are we talking within six months, a year, or more?

    Mike

  • new section (Score:3)

    by po_boy ( 69692 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @12:55PM (#284827)
    Also, notice that this is hanging out in the elite new developers [slashdot.org] section!
  • So, I hope this is more insiteful and evenhanded, but I don't need any more karma.

    Can I have your karma?

    --
  • My boxes are all running SAMBA bound to an internal NIC

    And would this not offer unfettered access to your internal network if one of the boxes was compromised through its public interface?

    Might be better to have a staging server behind the firewall, and use rsync or something to update the public webservers.

    Something to think about.

    --
  • My mistake, good job guys.

  • Point and click printing (Score:4)

    by 0xA ( 71424 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:18PM (#284832)
    Full support for the automatic downloading of Windows 2000 and Windows NT printer drivers, providing the first full implementation of the Windows NT point-and-print functionality independent of Microsoft code.


    This is a huge acomplishment. Using samba's print services has always been a bit of a PITA in large networks. You get a print spooler that doesn't hang when you look at it funny but you had to install drivers for each printer on the workstations. Micrsoft's server products will automagicly provide a driver for clients when you connect to the shared printer, now samba does it too.

    Hats of to Jeremy and the Samba team, this is a great feature.

    Would have been kind of nice to see 9x clients supported too though.
  • And if any slashdot editors are reading this, the colors in this section absolutely freakin' rule. Much better than YRO, for instance, which has always made me feel like puking.
  • Does this have support for the bastardized non-open protocol MS created out of kerberos?

    --
  • Yeah, but they do feel a lot like freshmeat. I wonder if they realised that. It's cool though, since I have long since forgotten my fm account info.

    Also, people that strongly believe that /. should not carry fm-like stories can just block this section.

    --
  • I find that when setting up sometning under unix, you can expect it to be working for a LONG time afterwords as well ... just recently at my place of employment I had to upgrade sendmail due to an ORBS warning, (which meant reconfiguring), and while it was a pain in the butt, one couldn't help but admire that the sendmail hadn't been touched since 1997 :)
  • My boxes are all running SAMBA bound to an internal NIC, which lets me manage them from my Windows workstations. Whether I'm logged in at the office or VPN'ing in, I can reach my OpenBSD boxes and update websites, develop, etc.

    I have the SAMBA servers as part of the domain, but it is a hacky solution. I map everyone's NT Domain name to a UNIX name, and they can access the appropriate files.

    NT Domain integration was always a little strange. With SAMBA 2.2, the issues should be much cleaner. ACcording to the release, I don't need to create Unix AND NT users, I can just grant access to my NT Domains. This was theoretically possible before with pam_smb (or smb_pam) but was always a confusing mess.

    Also, even if I need to create accounts for the users that log in, not having to create accounts for the users that ONLY access via SMB will be a blessing. Not having a bunch of accounts with shell false just to support SAMBA will make life easier.

    Adding an NT File Server is a joke, I plug it in, join the domain, create local groups (if I want) and share files with the permissions. Easy as pie.

    Doing the same on SAMBA was a pain because I needed to give each user a UNIX account. This meant that a server for 5-10 people was fine, but trying to give an arbitrary group access to the machine was a nightmare.

    This will be a tremendous release, and I look forward to putting it on test servers soon and deploying it in production in the next few months.

    Alex
  • Yeah, winbind was the "needed feature" for SAMBA. Hopefully this makes SAMBA a real solution instead of a quick Hack. I liked SAMBA as a way to access my Unix boxes, but I hated trying to use it as a real File/Print Server. Now it may be a solution to the never ending need for more NT servers.

    Alex
  • I'm from *Sheffield* (where they do "the Full Monty" :-) :-).

    Full Monty doesn't impress me. Def Leppard and Judas Priest, though: That impresses me.
    --

  • I should point out that Judas Priest are from Birmingham.

    My mistake. I was thinking of the Judas Priest album Sheffield Steel, but of course the album is actually British Steel [amazon.com] . Sheffield Steel [amazon.com] is a Joe Cocker album.
    --

  • Windows supports unattended installations...

    I'm pretty sure that the install of NT we were trying around here today was attended by demonic spirits. If the monitor started spewing forth pea-soup like liquids at me it wouldn't have surprised me at all.

    Justin Buist

  • Can't we just save everyone the trouble of bookmarking two sites and just glue /. and Freshmeat together

    You don't call Slashdot "Slashf---ed" when it covers dot-com bad news [f---edcompany.com]. So why call it Slashmeat? Slashdot covers only newsworthy software releases. This includes packages critical to system and network structure (OS kernels, server software, major security patches, etc.) and "cool" stuff that fits the day's omelet. The new Developers section goes a long way toward this*. If you want, you can exclude this section in your user settings [slashdot.org] if you don't want to look at so-called "Slashmeat."

    Either way, don't bother bookmarking two sites. A link to OSDN Freshmeat II [freshmeat.net] is in the OSDN box to the left of the textarea where I paste this very comment.

    * It also may represent budget cuts in the OSDN division of VA Linux Systems Inc. [google.com] If scoop and Taco can work together nicely enough, the integration of Slashdot and Freshmeat may be a Good Thing for LNUX's bottom line [yahoo.com].

  • And when Linux kernels rev and compilers break, this is....? Progress? Innovation?

    The GCC developers are not as worried about backwards compatibility as they are about CORRECTNESS. If new features highlight optimization BUGS or standards NON-CONFORMANCES in a given compiler, the compiler is at fault. GCC has kept up very nicely. If you are worried about a new compiler breaking your old code, compile with gcc -Wall to show where your code relies on non-conforming misfeatures of old compilers.

  • Other Samba News (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:57PM (#284860) Journal

    Fact:

    http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010417/0071.html [yahoo.com]

    Opinion:

    Slashdot mentioned VA Linux in this article. This makes it more difficult to complain about the lack of "full disclosure". On the other hand, important material information is still missing.

    It seems that in an effort to appear unbiased, the editors are reluctant to post anything about VA Linux at all, even when it is perfectly legitimate to do so. VA Linux hiring top level Samba developers is major news. Don't be ashamed, be proud!

    In their effort to avoid being perceived as a PR arm of VA Linux, they are being somewhat evasive and this is backfiring.

  • Of course SAMBA uses and even simple licensing scheme: connect as many clients as you want without any paperwork whatsoever. That's got to be a lot easier to deal with, don't you think?

  • I am running an older version of samba, where I have smbmnt suid root so that non root users can mount SMB shares.

    The bug that bothers me most is when a windows box goes down (can you imagine that?) only root can unmount the share.

    My question is whether this aspect of samba has been fixed. I have combed through all the online material and cant seem to find an answer to that.


  • Scheduled release for Windows XP is in the near future, but I don't belive it has went gold yet, I say M$FT breaks everything again, or in a friendly windowsupdate patch soon after release.

    I'll take that bet. Microsoft has actually been quite cooperative with the Storage Network Industry Association(SNIA) in providing more detailed information on how the Common Internet FileSystem(CIFS) (yes, that's MS's offical name for their networking protocol) servers and clients are supposed to work. It would be very hard for them to change something and not have it affect a lot of implementations. Now authentication software is a different story. I'm not sure what the status of their Kerberos business is.

  • Let's not forget our friends (Score:4)

    by AintTooProudToBeg ( 187954 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:32PM (#284882)
    the most important server apps on Linux

    And BSD
    And AIX
    And Solaris
    And Irix
    ...
  • Look also for freetds. The latest version is supposed to support SQL2k, and we hope to be testing it soon against that. It's worked fine for SQL7 for the past 6 months here, and the author has been very helpful when we've needed it. :)

  • I'd like to thank the Samba team for developing one of the two first "enterprise" useful tools for linux/unix (apache being the other). Their work has made it possible for Administrators who want the stability and functionality of unix while being hamstrung by technical incompetance at a managerial level.

    "We need to support all these windows users."

    "okay, let me setup this file server... yeah... windows..."
  • While I HATE WINS with a passion and wish it would be fully replaced by DNS everywhere... You may want to try this, which I found here: http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/155/09/2.h tml#1 [windowsitlibrary.com]

    There may be a way to do this via broadcast the same way Windows machines without WINS do, but I don't know it.

    WINS Clients -- Unix and Unix-like Systems It's very easy to configure any computer running SAMBA as a WINS client, but recall from the server discussion that SAMBA can't be a WINS server and a WINS client at the same time. So, first ensure that the smb.conf file entry "wins support = yes" (which configures the SAMBA computer as a WINS server) is a comment (the default). Then edit the next line to read "wins server = www.xxx.yyy.zzz ," where www.xxx.yyy.zzz is the IP address of your WINS server. You don't have to reboot the Unix computer. SAMBA automatically reads the configuration file changes. To force the changes to take place immediately, rather than waiting for SAMBA to read the changes from the configuration file, you can stop and restart the SAMBA programs using the /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb stop and /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start commands.

    You will have to configure a WINS server on one of the Windows servers for this to work, and add the WINS server entry to your DHCP configuration.

  • Projects like Samba, OpenH323, 1/2 of Enlightenment and a fair few others are why I am still in Australia =) ..(yes I know it's a collaborative effort - just good to know we've got some very smart people doing cool things =) not just the "Why whoop your collective butts in sports and we're still all criminals mentality") =)
    --

  • Re:"authentication source"? (Score:4)

    by hammock ( 247755 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:23PM (#284900) Homepage
    Does this version of Samba in essence emulate Microsoft's licensing agent, allowing free use of features that Microsoft wants you to pay for, or does this mean something else?
    Sounds like something that could result in a tidal wave of lawsuits from Redmond.

    Funny you should mention this situation. Are you familiar with Gateway Services for Netware included with Windows 2000 Server? What this allows you to do is set up a Novell server using IPX/SPX, connect a Win2k server to it with that service running, and an entire Win2k TCP/IP network of Windows clients can use the Novell server and only have to buy a single Netware license, since it's only using a single connection (the Win2k Server). Think of it as NAT for a Novell Server.

    A tidal wave of lawsuits? I don't see any from Novell against Microsoft, why should Microsoft care if Samba beat them at thier own (dirty) game?

    "Why didn't I join Microsoft? [LAUGHTER]"

  • Samba absolutely rules (Score:3)

    by nate1138 ( 325593 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @12:47PM (#284910)
    This has to be one of the coolest bits of software for *nix. Especially with the ability to act as a PDC, it allows an option of what server you want to use to manage your windows clients. I'll go where I damn well please today, thanks.

  • Re:Cost (Score:3)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @01:24PM (#284922)
    "the skill and effort required to install and configure it is not."

    ... but still less than the corresponding costs of a Win 2k Server liscence (any flavor) and all the corresponding CALs. The larger your organization, the more CALs you'll need to buy to support Win 2k Server, and the more tempting it will be to use Samba instead.

    Besides, installation of components in Linux is simpler than Windows (no rebooting), and the know-how needed to properly configure it will take an hour, maybe two to glean from the HOWTOs.

    "You have to consider the cost of employing someone with the required skills"

    ... or you can be smart enough to hire someone who can learn the skills

    Besides, the box of a Win 2k implementation might as well say "MCSE Not Included" right on it. At least with Linux you won't have to spend $1000's for the software on top of IT salaries

    "Windows supports unattended installations"

    ... as do several Linux distros...

    "provided the configuration settings are correctly specified."

    Like I said, "MCSE Not Included."

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