Although once again online, sambaXP 2024 from April 16-18 was a great event to bring people from all over the world together: Samba developers, users and enthusiasts shared their insights and engaged in constructive discussions despite major time zone differences. A heartfelt thanks to our sponsors—Google, Microsoft, and SerNet—for their continued support, making this event possible.
A total of 20 presentations are now available in the sambaXP 2024 playlist on YouTube and offer material for many hours of exploring the world of Samba. From the Samba team at SerNet, the presentation by Stefan Metzmacher on the SMB Witness Protocol is particularly recommended. In addition, Volker Lendecke compared SMB and NFS, Ralph Böhme dealt with SoS - Scale Out Samba, the comeback of Ceph. Microsoft's special Interoperability Track also provided insights into the development of the SMB protocol.
In his Welcome Note, Jeremy Allison, Chairman of sambaXP, discussed the XZ Utils backdoor and the lessons to be learned from it, for open source projects in general and Samba in particular. Allison: "The data that Samba protects is some of the most valuable data in the world. I'm talking about Samba as an Active Directory domain controller, which essentially contains the crown jewels of an organization. It contains the authentication and passwords of all the users that are in that domain." In light of the XZ-incident, Allison suggested a renewed focus on security protocols within the Samba community. He advocated increased alertness in code review and called for close vetting of contributions, especially from new or lesser-known authors. The existing practice of requiring every code submission to be reviewed by two engineers was highlighted as a crucial safeguard, although he acknowledged the challenges posed by the sheer volume of submissions and the potential for oversight. And, as he noted, "procedures alone cannot protect us from social engineering".
The welcome also served as a call to action for the wider open source community to seek support, "If money helps solve the problem, then we should ask for it." He emphasized the need to look for funding opportunities for critical open source projects – which also applies to Samba.
The sambaXP 2025 is already on the drawing board. Stay up to date on future events and important developments at sambaxp.org.
