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Interview with Andrew Tridgell, Samba Man 110

Posted by Hemos from the working-around-the-beast dept.
Henry Griggs sent us an interesting interview and article with Andrew Tridgell, aka the Samba Master. He talks about working with, and against Microsoft. I found it interesting that some groups would help, and other wouldn't-although now Samba is a recognized threat. How many of you folks use Samba, at work and such?
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Interview with Andrew Tridgell, Samba Man More

Interview with Andrew Tridgell, Samba Man

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  • So does this make it sort of like the NIS master server?
  • Does samba 2.* have much in the way of user/group accesses to shares? Currently they handle the NT server's shares by just creating 1:1 group:share. Then just add needed users to the group, and then only they can access that share (a few world readable shares, but those are easy). So basically, can you set that only this one group can access a certain share?

    If so, I'm sure I can talk the boss into it.

    Oh, is there any sort of surveys on how much stress Samba can take on given hardware?
  • What sort of a network do you use? At work we use Token Ring, it's sorta fast but I wouldn't say it's faster than a hard drive. My home 100baseT is fast, maybe closer, but I don't think it's that fast...

    No formal survey, just my opinions when I've moved large files to & fro both at work and at home.
  • What all is needed to do roaming profiles? I have logon path = \\%L\%U\.winprofile set, which is all the Samba book says is needed. Yet my Win98s don't ever write their info to there.

    On the other hand, a year or more ago I used it and it was fine (for Win95 back then). Then when I wanted to stop it, I removed the one line, and it still would read/write to that directory... Go figure. And yes, I restarted Samba after making the change. :)
  • I work at a HUGE corporation, and we have to pay via a 1-900 number to get support from MS. And of course, they always just blame it on some non-MS software that's installed on the PCs.

    Then again, our two NT "experts" only have one chant when something goes wrong, "Repair or rebuild, that's all I can think of."

    Please, somebody hire me to take me away from this nonsense!!
  • >Isn't thiat the guy from WHAM?

    Nah, that was Andrew Ridgley.

  • Generally:

    cd to the source directory.
    type "patch < patchfile"

    (Last post had my "<" eaten)


    --

  • MS Proxy (Score:1)

    by kdart ( 574 )
    Kinda makes you stop and wonder what "genius" switched out something that works for something that doesn't. Does MS Marketing really have the power to cloud people's minds?

    --
  • And AppleTalk (netatalk etc) as well. Our Linux box basically holds the network together, as it it doing masquerading as well. Samba is great, I'm sure glad it's available for dummy users who don't wanna FTP.
    ---
    Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude
  • Linux, OSF1, Solaris and FreeBSD. HP-UX soon. All at work, some at home. I can't imagine life without it. :)
  • Samba at work. P-II 350, 64 Megs RAM, 18 gig 40-Mbps SCSI. It is faster to copy from a local hard drive to the Samba server than to another partition on the same drive on the local machine.

    It's wicked fast, super reliable, and decently easy to administrate. Couldn't ask for anything more, really.

    The NT users can't tell the difference between the Linux Samba box and the NT server it replaced, except it's alot faster now ...
  • samba is not good enough to replace a production NT server yet. I have done a lot of experimentation with it, its getting better. its got a lot of flexibility, but its not quite there.

    Here at the University of Kansas, student mail and web servers (Digital Unix boxes) are running Samba. I'm not sure what the usage is on SMB to these things, but with 25-30,000 students, it's probably WAY more than an NT box could handle.

    Also, I'm not sure what experiments you've been running, but I'm never seen an NT box able to keep up with Samba -- performance or stability.
  • I use samba at work on a Sun U4000 on 1000SX backbone to serve 150 PCs, both general users and software developers. It has no problems handling the load, file locking, file based databases, MS Development tool projects, etc. It works great for sharing the same files via NFS.

    We have no NT servers.
  • I first set up a SAMBA server to support both faculty and student computing at Colorado State around '93. The die-hard MicroSoft sysadmin from hell hated it (he also hated the web server I set up - "Why do we need that, we have a gopher server?". Even back then SAMBA was reliable and fast and it saved our department TENS of thousands of dollars in stupid software, such as PC-NFS, Banyan Vines (barf), and memory managers to try to make it all work.

    This early experience with SAMBA was only the first of a series of lessons for me: while MicroSuck markets their supposed solutions, there is usually a much better solution to be found in the unix community, and almost always GNU or opens source in licensing.

    Oh, and if the MicroSuck sysadmin from hell (Scott) happens to read this: good - you are reading /. you might not be quite as stupid as you previously displayed.

    I couldn't help it. Maybe Rob could do a story on past sysadmins that we've all hated and what they had in common....
  • And if that doesn't work, "man patch" and find out what the various options do (hint: --dry-run is your friend!)
    -----
  • We don't yet use Samba extensively at the university where I work -- but then, we (thank goodness) don't use NT extensively either. We've found that Samba makes NT administration way easier -- for example, you can do things like log messages to different files depending on severity, instead of making them pop up annoyingly on administrators' screens.

    --

  • We've been using Samba since '95 when it was recommended to me by the sysadmin in Iona Tech. Apart from some flakiness around DST on the older versions (which really pissed off the developers) it's been great and saved us a fortune. It really is amazing the performance you can get from fairly generic machines.
  • Where I work some of the MVS guys put Samba on a
    mainframe, and it works like a charm. We've been
    using it for years on production UNIX servers,
    and now it looks like Samba on MVS will give
    Windows users a pretty impressive alternative to
    another flaky NT server...instead they map a
    drive to Big Iron. Very cool. Tell your MVS/Cobol guys to check it out.
  • I found out a week ago that we have been running Samba under Solaris for over three years. That's an example of good server software: it just works, and nobody knows how or why. When it's time to upgrade the server to handle more users, you have to look all over the place for them. We found the printer server in August, sitting in a small closet somewhere. It was a 486 running OS/2 Warp Server, and it had apparently been running since first installed without any problems. We rebooted the thing and left a small note for the next ones to find it.
  • We do a lot of testing on NT boxes, so SAMBA was a great help to us. We don't have any servers running NT...

    Pat
  • Precompiled binaries worked like a charm out of the box on solaris. The only two problems I've
    had with Samba were:

    1. old versions of Samba couldn't do MS encryption of the passwords (which is on by default on Win98
    and WinNT and can be disabled in the registry). If I had only RTFM before I started...

    2. If you have a mix of WinXX and Unix and want to browse, turn off NetBEUI on the PCs. WinXX boxes
    like to default to NetBEUI if both it and TCP/IP are enabled which leaves TCP/IP only clients like
    Unix boxes in the dark.

  • This would make a great poll topic! Possibly choices like:

    +At work +At home +At school +At work & home

    etc etc

  • Actually I D/Led v2 last week and set it up. It is working great! I haven't gotten into it too much, but it is allowing me to do basic directory sharing with my windows box.

    If this works out good over the next few months, I may use it when I network a friend's office.
  • When /. has reached a critical size now. Time to cache links such as this one at /.? Of course after asking for kind permissions. Is this legally possible?
  • About 18 months ago, I developed the 'itch' to connect my w95 desktop with the departmental AIX box. I had never heard of Samba, but soon turned it up in a web search. IIRC, from the time I hit the search engines with no idea what I would find to the time I had Samba compiled and running was less than a day. Within a couple weeks we were using it all over the dept.
  • ... in the streets of Rio can't be wrong!

  • Been using Samba for nearly a year, but it will never get "officially" used. Ah well. Anyway, I'm using it to give me access to the intranet directories for editing, and have it set up for a global share mapped by username (i.e. roaming private drive: where you log in, it follows.) Pretty handy, since we don't use profiles. But then again, I'm not allowed to map anyone to it or allow them to use it. So I use it as an instantly available backup when I give people new boxes.

    BTW, it's on a desktop P133 w/128MB ram, and IDE disks (not using software RAID,) running Caldera 1.3, and it STILL outperforms the P66 10K-RPM SCSI RAID5 NT PDC by a factor of 2. (Enough acronyms in a row for any PHB ;-)

    Samba rocks.

  • Could someone using NetBEUI on a TCP/IP network cause severe disruptions in the network? I remember that my WindowsNT box was suddenly incapable of finding network paths, without resorting to a HOST and WINS Configuration file.

    Was talking to my roomate who mentioned that I should use NetBEUI... Of course I use TCP/IP only but the problems persist, no matter what service pack I have.

    At first I thought it was SAMBA. But his 98 station gives me the "unable to resolv path" error, so that took the blame off SAMBA.
  • I use samba @work (a must when you have both linux and NTs). @home for my small network (actually 9 computers on 2 people ain't that low) which serves me and my griddy little brother, mainly for our little new company. Now if I could only find one more place where I can install it... Suggestions are welcome.

  • I'm using Samba 2.0.2 and setting it up to serve roaming profiles and act as a primary domain controller for a 100 client network.

    It is saving a lot in licensing costs, to say the least. :-)
  • That's exactly what I'm using it for, as a PDC.

    All it does is authenticate passwords, serve roaming profiles, serve files, and serve printers.

    The PDC support is very young, you should be able to find help on the samba web site at www.samba.org
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sorry, hit the enter key in haste.

    This summer I had the honor of installing SAMBA
    on a new O2 the company had for running SurfCAM.
    Quick, painless, and frighteningly easy once I
    downloaded the package from SGI's freeware site.

    Sure beat FTP-ing crap all over the place.
  • I am my school's webserver admin and we rely on Samba heavily to provide access to all of the terminals running Windows (which is about 95%). My company also uses it to allow shareable resources for the windows boxen. Without it, we'd be screwed.. Oh. And I use it at home.

    Long live OSS!
  • Before I started work at ASID, the Website was maintained via FTP -- everyone used a different account (which worked only because our Webserver is on a remote box that runs NT -- soon to change -- and the permissions were looser than a two-dollar hooker). Now people in the office connect to one share per domain name, that contains a mirrored copy of our website. When someone disconnects their session, postexec takes care of FTPing the changes using the wonderful tool sitecopy. Using Unix permissions, I can control who has accesss to overwrite what, and I can keep a log of everything that was changed.

    Go samba!
  • I think that is the most remarkable statement
    from this piece.

    It shows what kind of world is created when free
    software is used: one of mutual trust,
    cooperation, and admiration; rather than one
    filled with lawyers enforcing dubious claims of
    "Intellectual Property".

    "Intellectual Property" that will be abandoned
    once it is no longer profitable.

    The enormous cost to humanity, both financially
    and psychologically, of using proprietary
    software and protocols has yet to be tallied.

    Cheers to all Andrew and all of the Samba
    developers!
    ---------------------------------
    "The Internet interprets censorship as damage,

  • I'm using Samba 2.0 on our IBM S70 boxes (64bit AIX 4.3), and it runs like a dream. And the best part is not having to go through procurement to get it!

  • with samba and netatalk (both running off a linux box) our network at my job is a pretty happy family of windows nt/95/98, mac, solaris, and linux. it's great for developers who have to use windows or mac beause of some middleware that gets run that don't have an *nix development environment. just filesharing instead of using ftp makes everything so much more rapid.We've been using it (and linux) as a mission critical piece of our setup for about seven months.
    the linux box is so stable that samba interruptions from reboots or crashes aren't a factor- they don't happen. i think it's been up for about four months now, and the reason it went down then was the power went out on a weekend and nobody got there by the time the ups pooped out.
  • Pull out your Dictionary and look up 'Oxymoron'
  • Andrew Tridgell, perhaps... :)

    http://samba.anu.edu.au/~tridge
  • It's all very well setting up multiple shares for each, but we have a situation where we have an NT server with about 50GB of files, 450 shares (each with permissions), and thousands of directories under those shares, most of which have specific permissions granted to one or more groups or individuals. To allow someone to access a particular directory, I need just add them to the appropriate group.

    For example: I have a "Budgets" share. Under Budgets are directories for 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000. Under 1999 there is a separate directory for each of 20 business units. Under the "Networks" business unit directory are 10 subdirectories for each of the departments in Networks. Each departmental manager needs R/W access to his departmental directory. The BU manager needs R/W access to all the departmental directories, and the IT director needs R access to the lot. The Finance group needs R/W access to all the BU directories. The Management team needs R access to everything. Everyone else needs List access to the directories. Certain people may need specific access to particular files anywhere in that directory structure.

    I don't think you can get that functionality with Unix and Samba, whereas it's trivial with NT.

    Graeme
  • NT doesn't need Samba because it already has SMB built in. Samba is great if you would like to make files on a Unix box easily available to Windows clients. NT is great if you need permissions on the shared files. Stability isn't a problem with NT if you have decent hardware and NT is properly set up.In a large organisation, the file security is worth the cost of a bigger machine and NT.
  • I have been playing around with samba for about a year, but about three months ago, my Mom's cdrom fried it's self, and they needed to upgrade some of their software, so i created a new share, and mounted it in about 3 min. Personaly, i think samba rocks, i have found that it works perfictly, as long as you dont majorly screw up your hosts file (one mistake i once did).

    Within the next few weeks, i will be doing a demo of linux, samba, and squid for one of my mom's coworkers, the network admin where she works. There NT internet proxy has been hacked 3 times that i know of, so i hope to show them that there is an alternitive to winnt, and it's very very bad security. As once said in a file that i read many years ago, OEM's will allways keep bugs so you, the consumer will pay to have them fixed when somebody hacks you.

    oh, btw, my linux box hosts 4 windows boxes, and the only problems i have had was minor password problems, and when i screwed up my hosts file.

    i hope that samba lives forever.
    Long Live Linux, and Samba!

  • I have a graphical tar client that runs on Windows 95. Part of the Exceed package from Hummingbird. Having a tape deck connected to the linux machine I wanted to use it to back up files from the Windows 95 machine. I created a link from the tape device into a Samba share and simply named it tape. Now a file appears on the Windows 95 box named tape. The tar client reads it and writes it and the tape deck turns. Way cool! Now, could you do that with NT?
  • SMB dates back to the IBM/MS LanMan era.

    Microsoft used to love Samba, they saw it as a way to transition people from unix to NT. Now that it's being used in reverse to move people from NT to Unix, they're not so happy.

    As for MS changing the protocol, I doubt they have the balls. Too many big customers are using Samba, OS/2, various DOS clients, WfW, etc. They know SMB is essentially legacy, so their latest efforts revolve distributed file systems, Active-Directory based security, etc.
  • We use Samba here at the SEC to transfer gigabytes weekly from a 1.5 terabyte drive.
  • sure beats an NT server...
  • you'd spend longer than 14 minutes on hold trying to get help from micro$haft
  • You all forgot about Luke. He was the one who was the head of the NTDOM branch - that got Samba to where is it today. I trolled comp.protocols.smb every day for about three years answering and asking questions. One day soon I hope to get back to doing that...
  • Disclaimer: I have never used Samba personally. I have had (intentionally) limited experience with NT.

    NT is not good enough to be a production NT server yet. Even if Samba is flaky, it's not like anyone who's used NT could tell the difference, unless Samba is down more than it is up.
  • This is classic. "/. to the rescue".

    I was just gathering resources to back up my POV that we should not be using NT for our PDC's, but rather samba. Needless to say, most of the existing doc's were rather dry, but this piece is a great caketopper!

    Now let's hope my guys see the proper way of thinking...
  • "samba is not good enough to replace a production NT server yet."

    I'm pretty convinced of the stability of it - we've been using it for years now in varying capacities... The trick for me now is to convince the powers that be that Samba is a viable replacement for NT as a PDC.

    It's the same arguement that I have to make in favor of Hylafax. We've had it running on a production server since early '95. But now that we want to use it for our own purposes, everyone wants to know why Hyla is better than Winfax...

    In our environment, OS/Linux wares make a ton of sense, but it's sometimes tough to get people to accept that we can't call a 1-800 number an beg for support on it either.

    This will change in time, but it makes for interesting challenges from time to time.

    OTOH, the job is getting easier. The same people that were asking about Samba/Hyla were also quite impressed with the price on Star Office vs. that of Word.

  • I use samba at home for our network, works out really well. I am still using version 1.9.18p8, but I'll switch to 2.x once I've got the time, as for right now, what I have works :) I can't seem to get public access to work on some directories, even though they are set to public = yes (it keeps asking for a username/password), but I'm sure that's an error on my part, not a problem with samba.

    My site contains 100% GPL'd source code :)

  • I've been using Samba/FreeBSD for about 2.5 years to serve about 30 PC's. I took it down once to add new hard dirves/upgrade software, once due to an extended power outage, and now it needs to be upgraded to FreeBSD 3.1. It's sad to take it down with an uptime of 260 days.

  • I thought it was an article about Samba...
    --B
  • An NT domain is a complex system used to create trust relationships between NT machines, so that accounts which exist on one machine will also automatically exist on the others, so that you don't have to create an account a la Win95 every time you use a different machine in the domain (workplace, lab, whatever), and so that there's better security for network transactions (although it still has its flaws). The PDC is the core of an NT domain; it's the server that all the workstations authenticate against, and is for the most part the single point of configuration for the domain. All of this naturally means that Microsoft charges an arm and a leg for the license.

    Now imagine dropping a Unix box into place that can handle running your NT domain. Oh, the convenience... Sweet, happy penguins dancing in the cubicles...

    (In my defense, I don't use NT either--I just spend too much time tracking Samba development. :)
  • Having TCP/IP listed first isn't sufficient to guarantee good behavior on behalf of the Windows clients. Unless there is an unavoidable reason for having NetBEUI on the network (namely, old clients with no TCP/IP stack), NetBIOS-over-NetBEUI (or over IPX, for that matter) should be disabled.... This isn't only for Samba's sake, Windows networking becomes very fragile any time you have NetBIOS packets traveling around on more than one type of stack...
  • Well, I *did* use samba at home and at work, but since upgrading to Linux 2.0, it broke. Mabye the new version will work better...
  • I've wondered this but never got up the nerve to post to a newsgroup, but at least this is on topic. What's a Primary Domain Controller do, anyway? I've never used NT, just Linux and Win95/98. It's obviously something important (and presumably useful). Would someone care to enlighten me?
  • I am currently trying to set up Solaris - Win95 file sharing using Samba. Our sysadmin wants it, but doesn't want to install it. Since I am the only one in our group who knows or cares about
    free software, I have taken on this task. Gosh, I hope I do it well, otherwise it will hurt the reputation of free software around here.

    G

    "An bfuil cead agam dul amok???"
  • I work for a company in NZ called ECONZ (http://econz.co.nz) [econz.co.nz] and we use Samba so the Windoze crowd can access files and use CVS on the real computers while still using cruddy MS tools.

    I use it at home too, because I thought it would be cool to use a Linux server and still haven't managed to ditch all my Win95 legacy apps.

    I must admit that it grinds a little on a 20MHz 386 with 8Mb RAM... :)

    Vik :v)

  • Just installed 2.02 on 5 Linux-Boxes.

    Very satisfied!
  • Currently we're using Samba here but the thing that I don't like with our current version is the fact you need to enable clear text passwords with NT. My boss wanted to try another product "AIX connect" It Totally SUCKS!! We were on the phone with IBM for two days straight and we still don't have it working right. I'm lobbying to go to Samba 2.0 instead but we'll see... Once the passwords are all set it's a good solid product though... www.theregistry.org
  • That was my fault, sorry, not Slashdot's. When I submitted the story, my fingers ran away from my brain and typed some extra letters. Sorry about that.

    No offense meant to Andrew. I've sat in an audience in Australia, spellbound, listening to him speak. He packs maximum information into short times, and he's incredibly entertaining.
  • I run Samba for central storage, web publishing, mail directories, etc, etc, for 38,000+ users...on one machine. Requires quite a bit of computing horsepower for such a large user base, but it has never failed. It has met with such success, I've been hired to setup state school districts with similar setups. It's a powerful viable alternative for nicely interfacing with many many different clients...and I have stats to prove it. :)
  • Sun Ultra Enterprise 5000, 8 UltraSPARC processors, 6 gigs of ram, with a Sun fiberchannel array hanging off the side. ...had thousands of simultaneous connections and it hasn't phased the machine..so I doubt all of that is completely necessary, but the IBM RS6000 R-30 we had the service running on before couldn't handle it, but I like blaming that on AIX. :)
  • When I joined our company, actually, even when I worked up at Xerox, everything was PC and Novell, even though our department had a mixed environmnet with Macs, PCs, and Suns. So, wheat better to do than flip to NT to service the PCs and Macs, right? Wrong... best way to go was to install FreeBSD and Samba, Netatalk, and NFS with similar mounts... well, due to Xerox being stuck in the 1950s (still), I left before the master plan could be implemented. However, where I work now I ran into an already installed NT base, an decided it needed to be interoperable with the rest of our web development environment, hence similar filesystesm between PCs and Macs... viola... install the free stuff and away it chugged.... and still is chugging. I can't see why Microsoft makes such a case for thier software having such QUALITY when the most reliable stuff that works with their antiquated idea of an OS runs on UNIX and comes to the user free of charge...

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