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The SerNet organization team has set the date for sambaXP 2022. The event is scheduled for May 31st to June 2nd. It will be the 21st international Samba user and developer conference – and hopefully a chance to reunite in person again after a long time.

As for now, it is planned that the conference will again take place on site at the Hotel FreizeitIn in Göttingen, Germany. Updates on the sambaXP 2022 as well as the call for papers will be published on the conference website https://sambaxp.org.

The whole team looks forward to see everyone in Göttingen again.

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).

The program for this year's sambaXP May 4-6, 2021 is online. It is the 20th conference in this series and, like last year, will again take place purely virtually via Zoom. The agenda is filled with exciting talks for developers and users. Tickets can be booked via the conference website at https://sambaXP.org. Participation in sambaXP and the IO Lab is free of charge.

The sambaXP 2021 is sponsored by Google, Microsoft and SerNet.

sambaXP 2021 workshops and lectures

The traditional workshop day on May 4th will again kick off sambaXP. This year Stefan Kania will deal with the topic "Setting up Samba as a print server" from 3 pm to 9:30 pm CEST. The participation fee for this is 50 euros. A free two-hour workshop on "Integrating SAMBA+ AIX into an existing AD domain" will be offered by Björn Jacke from SerNet.

To enable as many people as possible worldwide to participate, the presentations will also start at 3 pm (CEST) on May 5. Nadine Dreymann from the organizing committee of SerNet: "Last year we saw excellent results with the virtual conference and were able to bring participants and speakers from different time zones together."  Jeremy Allison, chairman of sambaXP, kicks things off with his talk on using samba code in Google Chromebooks.  This year's topics include development insights such as "Samba AD DC Cockpit UI" and "Reverse engineering the Windows SMB server," as well as application experiences "Troubleshooting clustered Samba in Enterprise environments" and "Experience running a clustered Samba gateway for CERNBox." 

Among the speakers, SerNet's Samba team is also represented with current topics: 

• Stefan Metzmacher: Samba Multi-Channel/io_uring Status Update.
• Ralph Böhme: The New VFS 
• Volker Lendecke: Socket activation for Samba's RPC services

Details on all presentations can be found on the conference page.

SMB Interoperability Lab 

A Microsoft-sponsored SMB Interoperability Lab (IO Lab) will also be held online from Wednesday to Friday (May 5, 3 pm to May 7, 9 pm CEST). In the IO Lab, participants* will collaboratively test their implementations of SMB3, identify and troubleshoot issues in a collaborative environment.  SMB implementations that are still in the development phase are also welcome. The IO Lab is sponsored by Microsoft and conducted in Microsoft Teams.