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Software Windows

Samba 3.6 Released With SMB2 Support 88

Jeremy Allison - Sam wrote in to let us know the Samba project has made a major new release. The main highlight is support for SMB 2.0 which was released as part of Windows Vista. There are a number of other improvements to printing support, clustering, and identity mapping; details can be found in the release notes.
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Samba 3.6 Released With SMB2 Support

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  • Awesome (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @03:18PM (#37036728)

    I love playing as the Princess since she can float.

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      Among fans of classic video games, "SMB2" refers to the video game Super Mario Bros. 2: Mario Madness for Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the first game where Peach (then known only as Princess Toadstool) was playable. There is another game also called Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels, a mission-pack sequel to the original Super Mario Bros. that took a long time to get released outside Japan. This one is abbreviated "SMB2 (J)".

      Jokes about classic Mario games have been around since the dawn of S

  • I've been waiting since Sept 1/88. Now if they'd only add support for the light gun my life would be complete.

  • End of an era? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vlm ( 69642 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @03:29PM (#37036830)

    For the first time in 13 or so years, I'm not admining a samba instance at home or work. Recently killed off the last samba share at home due to some VLAN changes. Mounted filesystems all go over the AFS, or the netatalk. I don't do the "vista" and microsoft thing in general, so that doesn't matter. The macs tolerate the AFS and love the netatalk. The PCs actually work flawlessly as AFS clients, much better than in years past. The unix boxes all use the trinity of AFS / kerberos / ldap, and pretty much, always have used that. Samba, wheres that go, in this picture?

    Is there any reason to move back? or light up a new Samba so I could.... ummm

    • So you don't use it, does that make it an end of an era?

      Like it or not, but there are millions of small offices out there with Windows clients hanging off a Linux file server, so it's anything but the end of an era, especially as SMB2 is actually a much nicer protocol than SMB1.

      • by vlm ( 69642 )

        I personally switched because the alternatives finally worked better, did more of what I wanted, better cross platform support... Its the end of an era where the best LAN protocol for a new deployment is SMB...

        I acknowledge that switching is easier when you're only talking about a couple dozen boxes instead of 25K boxes. I suppose they'll always be legacy environments. That does not mean I'm actively interested in new advances in token ring cabling, or IPX/SPX, or decnet.

        • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

          AFS looks pretty complex to set up, whereas Samba is dead simple. Am I missing something?

          • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

            AFS looks pretty complex to set up, whereas Samba is dead simple. Am I missing something?

            Must be. All I had to do was apt-get install netatalk and I had home directories. One line per share for additional directories to share took care of everything else. It just worked...

            • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

              AFS and AFP are not the same thing.

              • AFS, for a start, is massively too complex for most home users or small business users, unless they have dedicated admins who understand it.

                I used AFS at home for a while, combined with Kerberos, for purely geek reasons. Being able to cd in to my friend's home directory in /afs/athena.mit.edu/users/ was amusing for a while. Until you remember that it's still as slow as hell when you're going out over your DSL connection and across the Atlantic to do it.

                One of these days I might set it up again with Window

                • by vlm ( 69642 )

                  AFS, for a start, is massively too complex for most home users or small business users,

                  Maybe if you set it up by reverse engineering the source code or watching protocol analyzer streams.

                  There's enough recipes out there, that if you can bake a cake, you can set up LDAP/Kerberos/AFS. In fact there are recipes that are so detailed they show screenshots and exactly what to type at each stage. Its literally easier than setting up a webserver (I've certainly done both enough times...). You know how you open a quality mouse hardware, and there's a printed poster with a dozen steps of how to inst

                  • The quality of information out there has probably improved quite a bit since I did it then, which was a considerable amount of time ago, really. Well, considerable by the standards of the internet (I suspect it might be getting on for 10 years ago). I was using a stack of OpenAFS, MIT Kerberos and OpenLDAP.

              • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

                AFS and AFP are not the same thing.

                D'oh. You are correct, sir.

                AFS is much more complicated to set up. I've set up & used AFS for a couple of months; AFS then smacked in the face with its shortcomings. AFS isn't a POSIX compliant FS - file locking in particular doesn't follow POSIX semantics, which introduces a number of limitations that aren't immediately apparent.

                Fire up KDE or GNOME and watch things break in strange and confusing ways... Home folders for a Linux Desktop typically have some form of database or file that can be accesse

                • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

                  That's very disappointing to hear, but it matches up with the minimal research I'd done. I'd love the feature set (networked, local caching, kinda like Google Gears but for a home directory) but it sounds like a very big hassle with lots and lots of warts.

                  • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

                    The wards are what pushed me towards NFSv4:
                    - Kerberos is supported on NFSv4.
                    - NFSv4 took inspiration from the good things in AFS; a full NFSv4 implementation will have local caching and will be securable over the Internet.
                        - If only somebody who has a clue would add support for something other than the old single DES for encryption (as is the case with NFSv3 & current builds of v4 on Linux). Sadly, I'm not that guy.

      • Really because I remember listening to an interview with Jeremy Allison who said it was terrible compared to SMB and that the only reason it was invented was to fuck with Samba. I believe this was it. http://www.twit.tv/floww14 [www.twit.tv]

        • The information came from someone within Microsoft who would have known at the time . Still, you make the best of what you have. The main advantage of SMB2 is that the Windows client redirector was completely rewritten and will now do pipelining of reads and writes. No reason that couldn't have been done in SMB1 - Volker did it for our smbclient libraries - but I believe Microsoft were really scared of messing with the SMB1 code. Everyone who knew it well had already left :-) . One of the benefits of no mon

    • I just looked at AFS on Wikipedia and it looks very interesting.

      What implementation of AFS do you use, server side and client side?

      Do you have any books or documentation online you could recommend?

      • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

        Try http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ [cmu.edu] Coda first it's a derivative of AFS2

        • Is Coda still developed? It seemed dead to me last time I went looking into the alternatives (some years ago, I'll admit).

          • by vlm ( 69642 )

            Is Coda still developed? It seemed dead to me last time I went looking into the alternatives (some years ago, I'll admit).

            Its dead; although no one develops it, supposedly it works. There's a mailing list with very light traffic, meaning either it never breaks or no one uses it, hard to say.

            I've heard it compared to XFS; Its very non-mainstream. Its users like it because of its special abilities. Sometimes it blows up very spectacularly and no one can figure out why. I have nothing against those characteristics; in my youth I dated women just like that. Just know what you're getting into.

      • by vlm ( 69642 )

        I just looked at AFS on Wikipedia and it looks very interesting.

        What implementation of AFS do you use, server side and client side?

        Do you have any books or documentation online you could recommend?

        Sorry for responding late but thats how it goes. The plain ole off the shelf Debian packages. Debian infrastructure uses LDAP internally, they eat their own dogfood, if there is one piece of infrastructure I'd trust it would be the Debian LDAP packages...

        The openafs guys make installable packages for mac and windows clients. Really boring, install and it goes. I am told its a stereotypical windows/mac experience in that either it "just works" or it is simply beyond untroubleshootable. Therefore since i

    • Is there any reason to move back? or light up a new Samba so I could.... ummm

      There are two reasons I continue to use Samba: laziness and it "just works" (for most definitions of "works"). Every single even remotely common personal computing platform has a SMB client either built in or readily available. This means that alternatives can't just be equal, they have to be better enough that it justifies the effort involved in installing and configuring the relevant client software rather than just clicking a few buttons and picking the share(s) you want to access.

      To directly answer yo

      • by vlm ( 69642 )

        FTP? Webdav? For the leaching, mythtv-web assuming thats what you're doing, or simple http server?

        • Still not as universal and easy to use as SMB. Neither OS X nor Windows' built-in GUI FTP clients are particularly useful (OS X's is read-only for some reason) and neither of those protocols have autodiscovery. If I open up the network browser on any of my machines, SMB shares are the only ones that will show up on all of 'em. Obviously the Macs also see AFP shares and if I have Avahi set up right it's possible to make WebDAV show up in Windows and Linux.

          Again it's about simplicity and universality. Bot

    • by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      AFS? As in Andrew File System? I didn't realize anyone used that in the real world still. I thought it had its own on-disk filesystem at the server end and other weird requirements. How do you set up AFS clients on Windows?
  • Now we just need someone to update rdesktop to make use of the new Remote Desktop features of Windows Vista.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dannyof47 ( 1110775 )
      Try the fork FreeRDP [freerdp.com]. A lot of problems with rdesktop have been fixed.
  • They released a new version of Windows?

  • A new SMB 2.0 specification?

    And how long will it take before Microsoft begins patent litigation against anyone who dares use Samba 3.6 in a commercial product?
    • Re:SMB 2.0 (Score:4, Informative)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @03:43PM (#37036982)

      Microsoft contributes to Samba and sees it as a necessary product. For mindlessly evil patent abuse, please visit your local Apple store, thanks.

      • Not to let Microsoft off the hook, but between the EU stomping on them and the reality that Samba is used in a helluva lot of different products, they simply can't afford to play hard ball with it. If they try to screw over the Samba team, they're going to piss off a lot of folks that build tech not just for *nix installations, but NASs and the like.

        • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

          Is Samba really more prevalant than FAT? Microsoft sued over FAT a few years ago.

          • by Ost99 ( 101831 )

            Microsoft today and Microsoft a few years ago are two different companies.

            • Just Microsoft today is two different companies, the left hand doesn't know what the right is up to. Part of M$ sees Samba as being something worth supporting, but it's still possible that a different part of M$ will try and sue them...
          • In pure numbers, no, but as a networking and communications protocol, it's all but ubiquitous in the enterprise market. A lot of organizations have built their IT infrastructure around Samba's working with Windows SMB.

      • by raddan ( 519638 ) *
        Is that true? I thought that the Samba people paid Microsoft for technical docs that a court order required Microsoft to provide. Have things changed?
    • I think Nintendo is a bigger worry.

  • I am glad to hear. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @03:38PM (#37036926)

    There is so much Microsoft Bashing going on that projects like Samba tend to get pushed off as "One of those" Project that only support the Evil Microsoft by Conforming to their standards, vs. trying to make Microsoft Better support ours.

    But I have found in Real Life, these tools greatly help increase the usage of Open Source systems. As well deminishes the need to use Microsoft Standards. As you setup you Samba Share and a NFS share (or whatever you want to use) that goes to the same files, you allow your organization to move away from those windows desktops.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      I think it's been 10 years since I heard anyone actually put forth the idea that isolationism would be good for open source. Embrace, extend, extinguish worked well for Microsoft. Open Source has done well with just the first two.

      • You are implying Open Source does not extinguish the systems it extends? All those dead (or zombie) Unix variants would tell a different story.

        It's about time to EEE Windows (too bad Exchange still holds).

        • by Hatta ( 162192 )

          No, I mean that extinguish isn't necessarily a goal. Like Linus said, "I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

      • by Keruo ( 771880 )
        Extinguish works in open source as well.
        It comes to play right after:
        # dmesg | tail -n1
        lp0: on fire
    • by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      In fact, Jeremy Allison (the Samba maintainer) holds officially approved non-Microsoft-puppet status from the Boycott Novell crowd (http://techrights.org/2006/12/31/jeremy-allison-interview/).
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @04:01PM (#37037212)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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