5 ms·

Samba versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects

84 points by fredley 7y ago

cardamomo 7y ago
I remember setting up Samba on a Debian file server in about 2007. (It was my first experience with Linux!) Ironically, all of the computers networked with the server were Macs.
bediger4000 7y ago
So we've now got legal weapons against any changes: Terms of Service, software patents, the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, stronger "Intellectual Property" laws world-wide, etc etc. I see this as part of an effort by society to lock down change, to make the current socio-economic order static, to keep the winners from becoming losers, and vice versa. I'm not entirely sure what's causing this reaction, other than a general fear of change.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It's not society. It's the rich and powerful few, who as they're already rich and powerful can ensure things will stay the same (status quo) for their heirs, perhaps barring huge social or technological revolution. Modern aristocracy.
- closeparen 7y ago
  People are free to enter contracts stipulating just about anything. Society may decide that certain terms are unconscionable, or that certain circumstances can't lead to a valid contract, but it's generally a "default allow" policy. Contracts being enforceable in the technology realm doesn't mean there's an "effort by society" to do anything; it would take effort to make them unenforceable. The intellectual property system is explicitly provided for in the Constitution; it's not a "reaction" to anything recent. Though I do think the shape of its application to software and digital media comes from impartial parties not having a good understanding, and competent parties being motivated to protect their interests.
  - bediger4000 7y ago
    The intellectual property system in the USA has grown well beyond the constitutional motivation of increasing the public domain. Giving a copyright for life + 70 years hardly gives anyone the motivation to increase the size of the public domain, but it does give them the motivation to game the system to PREVENT CHANGE.
tw04 7y ago
This doesn't even make sense... both S3 and Azure Blob have been reverse engineered by countless companies - no lawsuits in sight.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  You mean this S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html
  - tw04 7y ago
    Yes, I do mean that S3. The one with a link on how to utilize their API as a CLIENT. Notice it lacks any source code for setting up an S3 SERVER of any sort, which is why companies have had to reverse engineer it. It's also why anytime a third party says they support S3 - you have to ask EXACTLY what they support. I've yet to run into anybody claiming to be 100% compatible as the "standard" is constantly changing.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
TIL: Samba and SMB are not the same thing. This is why setting up your network shares by copy-pasting commands you found on a StackOverflow page and tweaking them until they work is a bad idea.
- RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
  Go on..
  - mmphosis 7y ago
    # SMB1 Mac OS X 10.5.8 ntlm auth = yes I should probably just switch to NFS.
    - xenadu02 7y ago
      If you think NFS is better than CIFS then prepare to be surprised.
    - JudgeWapner 7y ago
      Yeah so your whole system can freeze when something goes wrong. If the server is down, so is the umount command.
      - ciupicri 7y ago
        Even with the soft option?
jchw 7y ago
On the software patents front: the only winner here are the pockets of lawyers. Large tech companies are all in a state of constant litigation, and nowadays filing patents defensively is pretty standard in tech. I absolutely loathe where we’re at with software patents, but I have absolutely zero faith it will ever be fixed, so I guess anyone without billions to acquire a patent portfolio will just have to forget it.
jra_samba 7y ago
A brief history of Samba, but pretty accurate for all that ! Of course, the devil was in the details (and in the EU anti-trust case), but that's a story for another era :-).
new_realist 7y ago
Samba is a terrible piece of software, and under GPLv3 to boot. Combined, this is why no real vendors use it, only the poor. Further, it is laughable that the DMCA would apply to SMB.
- jra_samba 7y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble, but Google and IBM are both Samba users. As is Nutanix, Panzura and a whole host of on-prem -> Cloud gateway companies. You have a strange definition of poor :-).
  - jra_samba 7y ago
    Following up to myself (bad habit I know :-) here are the Samba related talks at the upcoming 2019 Storage Developer Conference at Santa Clara (full disclosure, one of them is mine in conjunction with Steve French from Microsoft). https://sniasdc19.pathable.com/meetings?query=samba&with[labels.id][]=110635&classes[]=Groups%3A%3AMeetings%3A%3AMeeting https://sniasdc19.pathable.com/meetings?query=samba&with[lab... If Samba is terrible and only used by poor people, why are there so many Samba related talks at SDC ?
  - noinsight 7y ago
    Do you mean for file sharing or as a directory server? File sharing I can definitely understand but I'm more skeptical about the directory server functionality. Big companies have the resources to do many weird things but it would still strike me as odd to be running Samba DS in production. How far along is the directory server these days in terms of stability and features?
    - jra_samba 7y ago
      The AD-DC works pretty well these days, and has been adopted as a standard solution by a major European government (what helps is a local vendor committing to support the solution). There are also some large cloud-based companies using it (and I mean other than the Amazon "Simple AD" solution that they never really promoted much - my suspicion was they did that to get a better price from Microsoft :-). Hang out on the samba-technical@lists.samba.org list and you'll find around 70-80% of the questions are from Samba-AD-DC users - the fileserver is considered a somewhat solved problem these days. Look at the email domains to get an idea of who is using it and for what.
derpherpsson 7y ago
Aaah.. SAMBA :D I read the samba hacker guide and how they had reverse-engineered the protocols over the years. MS Windows is not even compatible with ITSELF ffs lol ;D
- jra_samba 7y ago
  That was then but this is now :-). Microsoft now employ Samba Team members, fully document all the protocols used by Windows and help other vendors implement them. This is not your father's Microsoft :-).
  - rini17 7y ago
    I'll bite. How is it then possible that Windows10/Samba interop is more problematic as in my father's times? Unless there was a domain, it worked pretty much out of the box before. Now: https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10 https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10
    - jra_samba 7y ago
      It certainly isn't more problematic. You should see the volume of complaints we used to get :-). A lot of the issues are usually around authentication and user mapping. Kerberos is complex, and Unix people don't understand Active Directory. That's usually the core of it. Once you get a connection things mostly just work (except for Windows ACLs, for which I blame the Linux kernel developers who refuse to add Andreas Grunbachers RichACL patch set for ideological reasons). Sadly enough, if you want ACLs to "just work" on Linux you have to use a license-incompatible ZFS backend for which Samba has native ACL support. Or just use ZFS-on-FreeBSD where the license isn't a problem. It's one Linux filesystem developer in particular who is blocking the RichACL patch, who is known to be,... shall we say... "difficult" ?
      - amaccuish 7y ago
        Samba stores the ACLS in xattrs right? So they only problem is that they're not applied locally on the host?

84 points by fredley 7y ago

I remember setting up Samba on a Debian file server in about 2007. (It was my first experience with Linux!) Ironically, all of the computers networked with the server were Macs.

bediger4000 7y ago

So we've now got legal weapons against any changes: Terms of Service, software patents, the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, stronger "Intellectual Property" laws world-wide, etc etc. I see this as part of an effort by society to lock down change, to make the current socio-economic order static, to keep the winners from becoming losers, and vice versa. I'm not entirely sure what's causing this reaction, other than a general fear of change.

AstralStorm 7y ago
It's not society. It's the rich and powerful few, who as they're already rich and powerful can ensure things will stay the same (status quo) for their heirs, perhaps barring huge social or technological revolution. Modern aristocracy.
closeparen 7y ago
People are free to enter contracts stipulating just about anything. Society may decide that certain terms are unconscionable, or that certain circumstances can't lead to a valid contract, but it's generally a "default allow" policy. Contracts being enforceable in the technology realm doesn't mean there's an "effort by society" to do anything; it would take effort to make them unenforceable. The intellectual property system is explicitly provided for in the Constitution; it's not a "reaction" to anything recent. Though I do think the shape of its application to software and digital media comes from impartial parties not having a good understanding, and competent parties being motivated to protect their interests.
- bediger4000 7y ago
  The intellectual property system in the USA has grown well beyond the constitutional motivation of increasing the public domain. Giving a copyright for life + 70 years hardly gives anyone the motivation to increase the size of the public domain, but it does give them the motivation to game the system to PREVENT CHANGE.

tw04 7y ago

This doesn't even make sense... both S3 and Azure Blob have been reverse engineered by countless companies - no lawsuits in sight.

raverbashing 7y ago
You mean this S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html
- tw04 7y ago
  Yes, I do mean that S3. The one with a link on how to utilize their API as a CLIENT. Notice it lacks any source code for setting up an S3 SERVER of any sort, which is why companies have had to reverse engineer it. It's also why anytime a third party says they support S3 - you have to ask EXACTLY what they support. I've yet to run into anybody claiming to be 100% compatible as the "standard" is constantly changing.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

TIL: Samba and SMB are not the same thing. This is why setting up your network shares by copy-pasting commands you found on a StackOverflow page and tweaking them until they work is a bad idea.

RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
Go on..
- mmphosis 7y ago
  # SMB1 Mac OS X 10.5.8 ntlm auth = yes I should probably just switch to NFS.
  - xenadu02 7y ago
    If you think NFS is better than CIFS then prepare to be surprised.
  - JudgeWapner 7y ago
    Yeah so your whole system can freeze when something goes wrong. If the server is down, so is the umount command.
    - ciupicri 7y ago
      Even with the soft option?

jchw 7y ago

On the software patents front: the only winner here are the pockets of lawyers. Large tech companies are all in a state of constant litigation, and nowadays filing patents defensively is pretty standard in tech. I absolutely loathe where we’re at with software patents, but I have absolutely zero faith it will ever be fixed, so I guess anyone without billions to acquire a patent portfolio will just have to forget it.

jra_samba 7y ago

A brief history of Samba, but pretty accurate for all that ! Of course, the devil was in the details (and in the EU anti-trust case), but that's a story for another era :-).

new_realist 7y ago

Samba is a terrible piece of software, and under GPLv3 to boot. Combined, this is why no real vendors use it, only the poor. Further, it is laughable that the DMCA would apply to SMB.

jra_samba 7y ago
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Google and IBM are both Samba users. As is Nutanix, Panzura and a whole host of on-prem -> Cloud gateway companies. You have a strange definition of poor :-).
- jra_samba 7y ago
  Following up to myself (bad habit I know :-) here are the Samba related talks at the upcoming 2019 Storage Developer Conference at Santa Clara (full disclosure, one of them is mine in conjunction with Steve French from Microsoft). https://sniasdc19.pathable.com/meetings?query=samba&with[labels.id][]=110635&classes[]=Groups%3A%3AMeetings%3A%3AMeeting https://sniasdc19.pathable.com/meetings?query=samba&with[lab... If Samba is terrible and only used by poor people, why are there so many Samba related talks at SDC ?
- noinsight 7y ago
  Do you mean for file sharing or as a directory server? File sharing I can definitely understand but I'm more skeptical about the directory server functionality. Big companies have the resources to do many weird things but it would still strike me as odd to be running Samba DS in production. How far along is the directory server these days in terms of stability and features?
  - jra_samba 7y ago
    The AD-DC works pretty well these days, and has been adopted as a standard solution by a major European government (what helps is a local vendor committing to support the solution). There are also some large cloud-based companies using it (and I mean other than the Amazon "Simple AD" solution that they never really promoted much - my suspicion was they did that to get a better price from Microsoft :-). Hang out on the samba-technical@lists.samba.org list and you'll find around 70-80% of the questions are from Samba-AD-DC users - the fileserver is considered a somewhat solved problem these days. Look at the email domains to get an idea of who is using it and for what.

derpherpsson 7y ago

Aaah.. SAMBA :D I read the samba hacker guide and how they had reverse-engineered the protocols over the years. MS Windows is not even compatible with ITSELF ffs lol ;D

jra_samba 7y ago
That was then but this is now :-). Microsoft now employ Samba Team members, fully document all the protocols used by Windows and help other vendors implement them. This is not your father's Microsoft :-).
- rini17 7y ago
  I'll bite. How is it then possible that Windows10/Samba interop is more problematic as in my father's times? Unless there was a domain, it worked pretty much out of the box before. Now: https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10 https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10
  - jra_samba 7y ago
    It certainly isn't more problematic. You should see the volume of complaints we used to get :-). A lot of the issues are usually around authentication and user mapping. Kerberos is complex, and Unix people don't understand Active Directory. That's usually the core of it. Once you get a connection things mostly just work (except for Windows ACLs, for which I blame the Linux kernel developers who refuse to add Andreas Grunbachers RichACL patch set for ideological reasons). Sadly enough, if you want ACLs to "just work" on Linux you have to use a license-incompatible ZFS backend for which Samba has native ACL support. Or just use ZFS-on-FreeBSD where the license isn't a problem. It's one Linux filesystem developer in particular who is blocking the RichACL patch, who is known to be,... shall we say... "difficult" ?
    - amaccuish 7y ago
      Samba stores the ACLS in xattrs right? So they only problem is that they're not applied locally on the host?