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Although online once again, sambaXP 2022 was a great event for sharing new developments and exploring ideas around Samba, with participants and speakers from all over the world.  Special thanks to this year's sponsors Google, Microsoft and SerNet..

Presentations are all available online in the sambaXP 2022 YouTube playlist.

These talks can be re-watched:

• John Mulligan (Red Hat) The SINK Report – Updates on Samba in Containers & Kubernetes
• Ralph Böhme (SerNet): smbd – quo vadis?
• Stefan Metzmacher (SerNet): Kerberos/Authentication Updates in Samba
• Steve French (Microsoft): Improvements to SMB3.1.1 and Linux – a year in review
• David Mulder (SUSE): Certificate Auto Enrollment in Samba 
• Björn Jacke (SerNet / Samba Team): Installing and Running Samba on AIX
• Andrew Bartlett (Catalyst): The Inside Story on the Dollar Ticket Attack
• Martin Schwenke (DDN): CTDB report 2022
• Volker Lendecke (SerNet): Symlink races for dummies and how to deal with them
• Jeremy Allison (Google): The UNIX Filesystem API is profoundly broken – What to do about it?
• David Goebel (Microsoft): Azure Files - "mount" the Cloud​​​​​​​

Organizer SerNet hopes to host sambaXP again next year on-site in Goettingen, Germany. The entire team is looking forward to a physical community reunion. 

The SDC EMEA 2022 will be hosted as Virtual Conference on June 14, 2022. SerNet is happy to be a Branding Partner and to support the event. Several talks from SerNet colleagues are scheduled as well. Registration to participate in the conference is still open. 

A SMB3 Interoperability Lab will be part of SDC EMEA. Starting on June 14, the IO Lab will go on till June 16. The IO Lab is the (virtual) place to test implementations of SMB3 in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products. New features that have recently been added to the SMB3 protocol will be presented.

The Samba team at SerNet GmbH will reprise talks from the recent sambaXP 2022:

• Ralph Böhme: smbd, what's next? (12:20 p.m. CEST)
• Volker Lendecke: Symlink races for dummies and how to deal with them (12:40 p.m. CEST)
• Stefan Metzmacher: Kerberos/Authentication Updates in Samba (4:10 p.m. CEST)

So, if you missed sambaXP this year, SDC EMEA is a chance to catch up.

For the 20th time, sambaXP took place – and for the 2nd time, organizer SerNet hosted the event around the open source software Samba purely digitally. From May 4 to 6, 2021, participants from all over the world followed tutorials and a total of 24 presentations, and exchanged ideas remotely. The recordings are now online and can be viewed on the Samba YouTube channel. This year's sponsors again included Microsoft and Google.

The diverse program and interested attendees made for a rewarding event again in this 2nd Pandemic year. According to Nadine Dreymann, who is responsible for the organization of sambaXP on behalf of SerNet, 164 participants from 6 continents and a total of 30 countries registered for the virtual sambaXP. Dreymann also said, "Special thanks again to our sponsors Microsoft and Google, whose long-standing support contributes to the success." She states that Microsoft also added real value with the SMB Interoperability Lab (IO Lab), which was held in parallel with sambaXP for the first time.

Among the recordings of sambaXP 2021 are presentations by colleagues from SerNet's Samba team:

• Stefan Metzmacher: Samba Multi-Channel/io_uring Status Update (YouTube link: https://youtu.be/eYxp8yJHpik)
• Ralph Böhme: The New VFS (YouTube link: https://youtu.be/JUlT2QYddKY)
• Volker Lendecke: Socket activation for Samba's RPC services (YouTube link: https://youtu.be/IlD97BluvCM)

Additionally, the recording of the tutorial "Integrating SAMBA+ AIX into an existing AD domain" is available for watching (YouTube link: https://youtu.be/FwQpcnb-jTs). Björn Jacke, a long-time member of the international Samba team and SerNet's AIX expert, gives insights into SerNet's Samba packages for IBM's Unix operating system AIX.

For the coming year, Dreymann gives the outlook for a sambaXP 2022 at the traditional location in Göttingen: "We hope and very much look forward to the international Samba team and all interested parties meeting again in person, discussing with each other on site and also celebrating together."

For sambaXP 2021 Björn Jacke, longtime member of the international Samba Team and SerNet's AIX expert, has hosted a tutorial. We provide the recording of "Integrate SAMBA+ AIX in an existing AD domain" in our YouTube channel.

SAMBA+ AIX are SerNet’s Samba packages for IBM's AIX Unix operating system. The packages have minimal dependencies on third-party libraries or other external package sources – but come with a lot of advantages and support a lot of features. Please have a look at the basics on our SAMBA+ AIX information page. Also, our team will be happy to help with any questions or to get more in-depth technical details on SAMBA+ AIX. Get in contact with them via mail to contact@remove-this.sernet.com.

In his sambaXP 2020 talk, Mairo Rufus presented his results from Googles Summer of code 2019. Mentored by Samba team member Aurélien Aptel, Rufus worked on improving smbcmp. He received his Master in Computer Science last year at Polytechnic Yaounde, Cameroon.

Abstract

Smbcmp is a cli tool for making diffs between two pcap files containing SMB packets and rendering them using curses. For the first part of the project we had to make better diffs by using the pdml output of Tshark and for the second part we added a GUI and ported smbcmp to Windows.

Slides

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming month. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).