YOUR FEEDBACK
Werner Keil wrote: Java 6 update 10. If I'd be running Apple, I'd probably really drop dead...
AJAXWorld RIA Conference
$300 Savings Expire September 5th. Register Today and SAVE!


2008 East
DIAMOND SPONSOR:
Data Direct
Frontiers in Data Access: The Coming Wave in Data Services
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Red Hat
The Opening of Virtualization
Intel
Virtualization – Path to Predictive Enterprise
Green Hills
IT Security in a Hostile World
JBoss / freedom oss
Practical SOA Approach
GOLD SPONSORS:
Software AG
The Art & Science of SOA: How Governance Enables Adoption
PlateSpin
Effective Planning for Virtual Infrastructure Growth
Fujitsu
Automated Business Process Discovery & Virtualization Service
Ceedo
Workspace Virtualization
Click For 2007 West
Event Webcasts

2008 East
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Appcelerator
Think Fast: Accelerate AJAX Development with Appcelerator
GOLD SPONSORS:
DreamFace Interactive
The Ultimate Framework for Creating Personalized Web 2.0 Mashups
ICEsoft
AJAX and Social Computing for the Enterprise
Kaazing
Enterprise Comet: Real–Time, Real–Time, or Real–Time Web 2.0?
Nexaweb
Now Playing: Desktop Apps in the Browser!
Sun
jMaki as an AJAX Mashup Framework
POWER PANELS:
The Business Value
of RIAs
What Lies Beyond AJAX?
KEYNOTES:
Douglas Crockford
Can We Fix the Web?
Anthony Franco
2008: The Year of the RIA
Click For 2007 Event Webcasts
SYS-CON.TV
TOP LINKS YOU MUST CLICK ON


Samba Team Finally Delivers Samba 3.2
After Five Years & 31 Dot Releases Samba Delivers 3.2

Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison.

One Samba 3.2 innovation that Microsoft might adopt, Allison said, is its extension of the CIFS/SMB protocol to allow transport encryption. File system shares can now be marked as “encrypted” and all access to these shares is now encrypted over the network. Standard GSSAPI encryption techniques are used to safeguard the data.

Having spent the last year trying to get Samba 3.0 out and having been told by OEMs that Samna needs a more dependable release schedule, Samba is now going over to a Canonical-style update schedule of every six months. The next release is due in December, Allison said.

The 3.3 update will get out because Samba has recruited a woman product manager Karolin Seeger, who won’t take any crap from the Samba boys.

Allison says free software has a simply deployable record in attracting women engineers, much worst than proprietary software – if only because of the crudity FOSS developers exhibit – and he thinks that’s a serious deficit.

Anyway, Samba 3.2, which is compatible with all existing Samba installations, represents a code shrink, Allison said, so it fits in network attached storage better. Samba is popular in NAS solutions, everything from high-end clustered business-critical systems to low-end consumer devices, and all the spots in between.

Its memory footprint was reduced by using a Samba-developed “talloc” library to accommodate embedded devices with limited memory requirements. All restrictions on file name lengths have been removed.

Samba 3.2 also introduces a registry-based configuration system to make it easier to embed in appliances and manage its configuration via the supplied commands or library functions without having to write scripts to modify a text file.

The team says that Samba 3.2, in conjunction with the ctdb (http://ctdb.samba.org) libraries and a back-end distributed file system such as Sun’s Lustre, IBM’s GPFS or Red Hat’s GFS, can provide a fully clustered file server solution. Every node can simultaneously serve an identical, consistent view of the exported file system. Not just a simple “fail-over” high-availability solution, Samba 3.2 with ctdb provides a scalable clustered file server solution with full Windows file-sharing semantics. Samba and ctdb are already being shipped in production file serving products to customers in fields such as animation and video production.

There is supposed to be improved integration with Windows and has been tested with the latest Windows clients and servers, such as Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008.

The networking functions have been rewritten to ensure Samba 3.2 is fully IPv6-compliant. Customers can now use Samba in an IPv6-only network, and it has been tested to work with the Windows IPv6 implementations as well as UNIX IPv6 implementations.

Samba 3.2 also begins Samba’s migration from a monolithic application to a more modular architecture comprised of library functions that can be used to control and configure the Samba environment. The new libnetapi library to control domain membership is one of the first examples of this new approach.

Samba is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. It was the first major open source project outside the Free Software Foundation adopt the rewritten license last year.

About Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE LATEST STORIES . . .
Alfresco Software announced that Adobe has implemented Alfresco’s document sharing and collaboration capabilities as part of the file sharing features in Acrobat.com. Adobe chose Alfresco as its content repository for its clustered high-availability, security, and highly capable tec...
Open Systems has announced that TRAVERSE v10.5 has been certified to run on Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 database server. SQL Server 2008 promises a dynamic platform for business-critical applications and enterprise-class data management, and is available in seven editions, ranging from...
qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative AJAX application framework. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is needed. It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI ...
Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) are hardly new in Information Technology: EAI, ESB, SOA, BPM, BAM, ETL, MDM; the list goes on and on. This article is about yet another three-letter acronym, EDA, which stands for Event-Driven Architecture. EDA is not a brand new technology, but rather a pr...
Imagine the CIO of a consumer bank who thinks he is running 50 Oracle databases, but now finds out that in fact he has 100 databases installed behind his firewall. He doesn't have any idea where the other 50 came from. He doesn’t know the name of the vendor(s) supporting them. And he...
I was shocked. We were in the brainstorming phase of developing a new collaboration portal and the possibilities were flying. It was exciting to see people from many disciplines enthusiastic about working together more effectively through improved communication, document management, an...
SUBSCRIBE TO THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL NEWSLETTERS
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEEDS & GET YOUR SYS-CON NEWS LIVE!
Click to Add our RSS Feeds to the Service of Your Choice:
Google Reader or Homepage Add to My Yahoo! Subscribe with Bloglines Subscribe in NewsGator Online
myFeedster Add to My AOL Subscribe in Rojo Add 'Hugg' to Newsburst from CNET News.com Kinja Digest View Additional SYS-CON Feeds
Publish Your Article! Please send it to editorial(at)sys-con.com!

Advertise on this site! Contact advertising(at)sys-con.com! 201 802-3021


SYS-CON FEATURED WHITEPAPERS

ADS BY GOOGLE