Samba versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects | Hacker News Reader

Samba versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects

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84 pointsfredley30 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-).

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

You mean this S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html

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.

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.

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.

Go on..

   # SMB1 Mac OS X 10.5.8
      ntlm auth = yes

I should probably just switch to NFS.

If you think NFS is better than CIFS then prepare to be surprised.

Yeah so your whole system can freeze when something goes wrong. If the server is down, so is the umount command.

Even with the soft option?

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

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 :-).

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

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" ?

Samba stores the ACLS in xattrs right? So they only problem is that they're not applied locally on the host?

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.

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 :-).

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[lab...

If Samba is terrible and only used by poor people, why are there so many Samba related talks at SDC ?

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?

I actually did deploy a Samba-only AD domain for a warehouse at my current company (for which I was the sole IT tech at the time). Worked pretty reliably for our purposes, and now (a year-ish later) I'm prepping to expand that to the other warehouses.

Our uses for it ain't really all that significant, though; it's mostly for user management (and only for some things, like desktop logins, SMB shares, and our client VPN auth).

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.

Hmm what is the modern file sharing thing that we are supposed to use that is not Samba? if I wanted to share some directories on my LAN that can be browsed/read/written to by non-technical users without extra software what is the right thing to use these days?

Why are you not supposed to use Samba ? Samba works great as an SMB 2/3+ file server. Both Mac's and Windows use SMB3 as their native file sharing protocol, and Microsoft employ the cifsfs (SMB3+) linux kernel client maintainer.

It's just easier to keep using SMB3 :-).

Samba is working great for me. Several DCs, extended the schema for various different uses (storing TOTP seeds, Kopano mail attributes). Only thing that would make life easier is DFS-R for sysvol and WMI for 2012+ DCs. Used to be a nightmare but since about 4.3+ it's worked flawlessly.

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