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The year 2020 presented new challenges for the Samba eXPerience: For the first time, the 19th international conference on the open source software Samba took place exclusively in digital form from 26th to 28th May 2020. The annual meeting of the international Samba team, which is usually held in Göttingen, was also highly successful as an online event. The sambaXP 2020 was again sponsored by Google and Microsoft.

Thanks to the virtual format, the sambaXP was even able to grow: 150 developers, users, manufacturers and system houses from the samba ecosystem from a total of 23 countries took part in 2020. One of the planning challenges was therefore to set the times of the conference in a sensible way. The setting of a daily frame from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. CEST made it possible for both speakers and participants alike to follow attentively. A positive side effect also resulted from the use of an online conference system: organizer SerNet will publish videos of the talks for the first time. These are still going through a release process (GDPR) and will go online shortly. The presentation slides are already available.

Feedback on the sambaXP Online Edition has been throughout positive, both on the part of the event organizer and the participants. Only the personal, networking character of the conference was missed. For the future SerNet is therefore working on a format that combines the advantageous online components with the benefits of a meeting on site. 

Volker Lendecke, SerNet co-founder and long-time Samba Team member, was once again a speaker at SDC EMEA. At this year’s conference (February 4, 2020 – Tel Aviv, Israel) he specifically addressed integrators who want to use Samba. The recording is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RHHsTfKmI_c (direct link).

Lendecke deals with these points in his lecture "Samba for integrators":

• Samba architecture:
  • What components does Samba consist of?
  • What protocols does Samba implement?
  • What process model does Samba utilize?
• Samba SMB server:
  • What file system features does Samba expect?
  • Common complications and performance issues
  • Samba features for NFS interoperability
• Samba authentication:
  • Overview of authentication mechanisms in the Active Directory world
  • The role of Samba's winbind daemon: Authentication and idmapping
  • Winbind API and services for non-Samba SMB servers
• Samba Remote Procedure Call services:
  • Requirements for seamless Windows interop beyond SMB
  • Protocol description for RPC services (direct TCP, named pipes)
  • Samba components that help non-Samba SMB servers

For the first time the Samba eXPerience 2020 will take place as a digital event. The 19th international conference around the OpenSource software Samba will be held from 26th - 28th May 2020 as an online event, sponsored by Google and Microsoft. The virtual participation is free of charge, registration is via https://sambaxp.org. Unfortunately, the planned IO-Lab has to be cancelled.

Due to the current COVID-19 situation and the resulting travel and assembly restrictions, the organizing committee has decided to realize a digital edition of sambaXP this year. The speakers will give their presentations live from their desks, so that participants can follow the conference from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Compared to the usual event format, the online event offers even more flexibility: simply switch between tracks running in parallel or follow two presentations simultaneously - no problem at all. The event is also recorded and will be available online at a later date.

The traditional tutorial by Stefan Kania will also be held as a webinar on the day before the conference (Tuesday, 25 May 2020). This year's topic: "Clustering with CTDB". There will be a fee of 50 Euro for participation. Booking is also possible via https://sambaxp.org.

The sambaXP is the annual meeting of the international Samba team with developers, users, manufacturers and system houses from the Samba ecosystem, which has been held annually since 2002. Questions arising from the change in the event format, among other things, will be answered by the organizing committee on the conference website at https://sambaxp.org.

The organizing committee is also available to answer any questions at loc@remove-this.sambaXP.org.

Volker Lendecke will give a talk on "Implementing SMB Semantics in a Linux Cluster" at Vault '20, the Linux Storage and Filesystems Conference on February 24–25, 2020, in Santa Clara, CA/USA. Lendecke is SerNet co-founder and long-time Samba Team member.

The talk is scheduled onTuesday, 2:30 pm–3:00 pm. From the abstract:

"To implement the SMB protocol, Samba has to implement semantics that are not covered by the Linux kernel API. The protocol element to mention here are the concept of share modes and leases, similar to NFSv4 share reservations and delegations. To implement those, Samba has to maintain data structures in user space and keep those consistent across cluster nodes. One of those data structures is a central table containing SMB-level information about all file open instances.

This talk will describe the semantics to be implemented, the challenges for clustered implementations of the SMB protocol and approaches by the Samba Team to make this scale well across nodes."

At the Storage Developer Conferenece (SDC) last year (September 23 - 26, 2019, Santa Clara/California), Volker Lendecke and Ralph Böhme, both part of SerNet and the international Samba Team, gave presentations. These are available on the SNIA YouTube channel.

Ralph Böhme: What's new in Samba?
Direct Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7cngkehwP8
Abstract: Presenting an overview on the latest advancements, new features and changes in Samba. The key focus is on Samba's SMB3 fileserver implementation, while also covering recent enhancements in Clustered Samba and Samba's implementation of Active Directory.

Volker Lendecke: Samba's RPC Services for non GPL SMB Servers
Direct Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ePEfzPrqDg
Abstract: Implementing [MS-SMB2] is a first step towards Windows interoperability. The simple task of listing shares is a nontrivial challenge, because Windows uses the srvsvc RPC service for this. Samba provides a seamless Windows user experience, it implements both SMB and RPC. It does so in a way that can be easily split apart in a GPL-compatible manner without putting GPL requirements on the SMB implementation. This talk presents a project where a non-GPL SMB implementor uses Samba's RPC implementation to provide a share listing and other RPC-based services, providing a much shorter time to market than by implementing the RPC stack independently. The talk also covers ways forward how Samba could implement a full RPC stack usable for simple integration of other RPC-based services.

Volker Lendecke:  Progress in making clustered Samba more scalable
Direct Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jewaMvKD32o
Abstract: This talk is a sequel to the 2018 talk about how to make Samba really fly in a clustered environment (direct link). It provides insights on the progress of the deep restructuring of Samba's core data structures as well as plans to optimize both the isolated as well as the heavily concurrent, shared file access that suffers from significant lock contention on internal data structures.