Posts in 'samba' – Page 2

SerNet asks Microsoft for specs

Now that the European court has decided SerNet has asked Microsoft to publish specifications on SMB/CIFS.

Martijn has posted some photos of the concert we went to a couple of days ago.

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Podcast with the Samba team

Last week was the annual Samba get-together in the US. Jeremy and Leslie from Google organized a somewhat more informal event than the SNIA CIFS interop lab that we usually attend.

Several Samba team members, including myself, took part in a podcast about our involvement in the Summer of Code afterwards.

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SambaXP: a year with leaps of progress

Like most of the Samba team, I attended SambaXP in Goettingen again last week. This year we were able to announce a couple of big leaps forward:

OpenChange

Julien’s talk about OpenChange was probably the most interesting and surprising one this year. After three years of hard work (I remember spending a lot of time in front of a beamer looking at network packets in 2004 when they started), the OpenChange team has figured out the enough bits of the MAPI (Exchange/Outlook) protocol that they can fetch and send emails using an Exchange server.

At the moment, there is a simple command-line client that can fetch into a mbox file and send mails in a way somewhat similar to the “mail” command. There also is a highly experimental plugin for evolution.

Most work will now have to focus on the most interesting bit - providing a Free Software implementation of a MAPI server.

DRSUAPI

Metze announced that he’s been able to work out how the directory replication protocol that is used between DC’s in an Active Directory environment works. This is very important, because we need that protocol in order to be able to live as a DC in an Active Directory environment that has more than one DC.

Halfway through preparing our (now yearly) talk about the status of Samba 4, Andrew and I realized we’re actually not too far away from being able to do the first alpha of Samba 4. We hope we can release one in the next few months.

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Samba 4 progress

I’ve been busy getting some more of my pending Samba 4 work merged. In the past week, I’ve worked on:

  • Getting the registry branch Wilco and I have been working on ready to be merged
  • Moved out the GTK+ stuff of the main tree into a separate one
  • A bunch of improvements to the build farm. Mainly refactoring code so we can switch to using a database backend
  • Random pidl improvements (mainly better warnings and errors)
  • Rewritten test interface in perl with the ability to run tests in a more fine-grained way

It looks like I’ll be mainly working on pidl stuff for the next few weeks and then on GSSAPI support for CIFS VFS.

My blog now also has a real-life tag, in case I’d ever want to post about things other than travel or free software stuff.

Currently Playing: Robert Johnson - Malted Milk

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Code coverage testing

Over the past week or so, trying to make sure all my code is covered by the unit tests, I’ve been playing with gcov and various other code coverage tools. Especially lcov and perls’ Devel::Cover give very nice, browsable HTML output.

Test code coverage for some of the projects I work on:

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More use of IDL

The IDL (r)evolution is really taking place now. We’re slowly getting rid of the Samba3 DCE/RPC parsers that we were previously using and are moving towards new code generated from the IDL by pidl.

An increasing amount of dissectors of wireshark is now also generated from IDL, thanks to the work of Ronnie Sahlberg. There’s a list at their wiki.

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New job

Google’s Summer of Code was again a pleasure to participate in! I’m quite pleased with the overall results and have enjoyed working on the CUPS tree. Mike, main author of CUPS, has merged my Kerberos branch into trunk a couple of days ago. It should be part of the upcoming 1.3 series. My aim is to stick around and maybe work on SPNEGO/NTLMSSP support.

As of recently I have started working part-time for SerNet. I’ll be working on random Samba bits for them, all free software. The first thing I’m working on is backporting the excellent libndr (one of the core parts of DCE/RPC) subsystem from Samba 4 to Samba 3.

The university year has also started, so my activity in free software will probably decrease a bit in a few days.

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SoC Deadline

It’s almost 2 AM here, in other words, 17:00 PM in California - just a few more minutes before the list of SoC applicants will apparently be published. Hopefully one of my applications will be accepted; the quality of applications appears to be better overall than last year, so it’ll be tough…

Currently Playing: Stevie Ray Vaughn - Crossfire

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Upcoming talks

I will be giving talks on Samba talks during three upcoming events: SambaXP 2006 (25 April), The Free Software Bazaar at SANE 2006 (17 May), NLLGG meeting, 2006 (10 June).

The first two talks will focus on Samba 4 and its current state. The third will be a generic introduction to Samba.

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pdbsql finally working again…

I was glad to see that pdbsql is finally somewhat stable again, thanks to Wilco’s help. It’s always bad to see good code bitrot. Luckily, that’s not going to happen here :-)

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Samba 4 Status Report Edition 6

It’s once again been a busy week for Samba 4.

Simo has worked on making more of the LDB code asynchronous.

Metze has reworked some of the NTVFS code to be generic for use by both the smb and smb2 subsystems. Tridge and metze have worked on inotify support. Tridge fixed a bunch of bugs, reported by a static code analyser.

Andrew fixed several bugs, mostly auth-related and improved some of the tests.

Rafal has made more of the DCE/RPC subsystem asynchronous, in particular the connect bits.

I spent it working on various bits of the build system; we now support using shared libraries internally. All modules can be built as .so files and all subsystems (including LDB) support loading extra functionality using .so files. Try it out by running “./configure —enable-dso”. This should make it much easier for other projects to use parts of Samba or hook into Samba. Automatic dependencies are now also generated; just on GNU make 3.81 and higher for the moment though, as older versions appear to be buggy.

The registry (just the core, not all backends though) now keeps track of credentials information. A feature which Andrew had been asking me about for ages but which I kept postponing. :-)

A more detailed list can be found in the WHATSNEW.txt prepared for tomorrows’ release.

I’m planning on releasing TP 2 tomorrow morning. Everything seems stable - and the release is long overdue (originally planned to be at the end of february).

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Samba 4 Status Report Edition 5

It’s been another busy week for Samba 4. I’ve been so distracted with actual development the last couple of weeks that I haven’t actually had time to post an update report on it.

Metze and I have been working on making some of Samba4’s internal files build as shared libraries. The idea is that we will later be able to ‘export’ libraries and make them easily available for others to use (GNOME, KDE, OpenChange). At the moment, we have support for shared libraries partially finished. Those interested in checking it out can do so by passing —enable-dso to the configure script.

Tridge has been working on inotify support in the NTVFS layer (file change notifications).

Rafal (mimir) has made the core of the DCE/RPC layer asynchronous.

Of course, there have been a lot of smaller changes as well.

It’s been a busy week for Samba, overall. After Coverity published a list of potential bugs found by their static code analysis tools, Samba3 development got a major boost. In the meanwhile, we’ve delayed TP2 again. We’re now waiting until things settle down, hopefully in the next few days.

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pdb_sql moved out of tree

The original project that got me working on Samba, pdb_mysql has been moved out of the Samba tree. There’s been quite some discussion about this in the past few months, after several grave usability bugs that indicated I wasn’t maintaining it actively enough (I haven’t actually used it for a few years now).

After some discussion, the pdb_sql modules have been removed from the SVN tree and now Florian and some other folks have picked it up and are continuing development as a seperate project. It’s been a bit hard letting go, but also good to see the source code isn’t going to bitrot away in the deep archives of the internet.

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Moving forward to the next ‘tipi’

The first technology preview for Samba 4 has sparked quite a bit of interest from users and we have already received several bugreports. At the moment, all work is focused on the next ‘tipi’ for which we have set some milestones. The target date is sometime next - hopefully just before FOSDEM.

Linux.Conf.A has really been great so far. It’s a by far a nicer and more technical conference than any I have attended in Europe.

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Samba 4 TP 1 Unleashed

So, today was the day… we have just released the first Technology Preview of Samba 4. It is still a long way for release, but we hope it will attract some attention of the community and result in useful bug reports and suggestions.

While I built the final tarball and did the announcement, Andrew Bartlett was the main force that finally made this release happen. He worked hard over the past few months to fix the remaining issues that were required to make Samba 4 actually usable.

Meanwhile, several large sites have picked up the announcement, news.samba.org has a list.

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