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In this "Report from the field" Günther Deschner (Red Hat / Samba Team) and Anoop C S (Red Hat) talk about "Samba clustering with GlusterFS". Their presentation was part of this year's sambaXP 2020.

Abstract

Samba supports building a clustered SMB storage solution using the Gluster filesystem for several years now. While Samba and it’s cluster component CTDB are well established components for SMB clustering, the Gluster filesystem itself needed to adapt in various areas to provide all necessary features.

The talk covers the lessons learned during the process of maturing the Samba and GlusterFS setup and explore the architecture of Samba and GlusterFS in general. Based on support experiences we  point out the importance of sometimes overseen prerequisites in the area of networking and DNS. Driven by customer demands several important performance improvements have been made in the past months. Users of the glusterfs fuse filesystem now can use a new Samba VFS module that provides enhanced guarantees for accessing files within the cluster. It also implements a mechanism to circumvent expensive case folding pathname operations. The older Samba VFS module which consumes Gluster’s gfapi library now uses Samba’s threadpool implementation based on pthreads which lead to significant performance improvements. The presentation concludes with an outlook for the ongoing work related to SMB3 features such as multichannel and transparent failover.

(Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. 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 way to modern Kerberos features" is the title of the sambaXP 2020 talk by Stefan Metzmacher. Metzmacher is part of Sernet's Team Samba and also a member of the international Samba Team.

Abstract

• Using S4U2Self in winbindd
• The limitations of existing kerberos libraries
• The challenges of adding new features to kerberos libraries
• Kerberos testing with plain python

(Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. 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).

Michael Adam is in search for "A stage for Samba in the era of the container platform!?" in his sambaXP 2020 talk. Adam is a Adam is a longtime Samba team member and works as Senior Manager Software Engineering at Red Hat (LinkedIn).

Abstract

In recent times, container application platforms, in particular kubernetes, have become extremely popular, have for instance overtaken the virtual machine centric cloud operating system OpenStack in popularity. In contrast to virtual machine environments which run a variety of operating systems and therefore also have natural use cases for Samba, container platforms are usually running one operating system (kernel) only, and thus don’t offer a very obvious space for Samba, whose main purpose is to act as an agent between different operating systems. Is there still a stage for Samba in container land?

This presentation starts with an introduction to the storage concepts of kubernetes and the container storage interface standard CSI, which generalizes these to other container platforms. It will explain the roles of file, block, and object storage in kubernetes and then shows how a distributed software defined storage system like ceph or gluster is brought into kubernetes, running alongside the consuming applications and managed by so called “operators”, providing storage self service for the applications.

From here on, the presentation explores some very interesting and possibly surprising opportunities for Samba in this environment. Details are omitted in this abstract in order to keep up the suspense. (Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. 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).

Alexander Bokovoy and Florence Blanc-Renaud (both RedHat) talk about "FreeIPA Global Catalog challenges" in this sambaXP 2020 talk. Bokovoy is a Samba team member since 2003 and FreeIPA core developer since 2011; Blanc-Renaud is a LDAP server technology engineer since 2007 and FreeIPA core developer since 2016.

Abstract

At sambaXP 2017, Alexander Bokovoy and Florence Blanc-Renaud reported an initial progress into making Global Catalog service available as a part of FreeIPA deployment. Three years later, Global Catalog in FreeIPA is becoming a reality. In this talk they demonstrate a working Global Catalog service and dive into challenges they faced in mapping FreeIPA to Active Directory world without being an Active Directory domain controller. FreeIPA's use of Samba services continues to exercise Samba infrastructure from a perspective not commonly experienced and well tested. Finally, semantic differences Bokovoy and Blanc-Renaud encountered across multiple protocols and their implementations in open source and proprietary products represent a good lesson in interoperability efforts. (Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. These were selected by SerNet's "Team Samba". 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).

This year's Storage Developer Conference (September 22-23, 2020) will be a virtual event. Volker Ledecke and Stefan Metzmacher have already pre-recorderd talks for the SMB agenda track.

Volker Lendecke will address "Samba locking architecture". Lendecke is SerNet co-founder, developer and long-time Samba Team member. 

Stefan Metzmacher's topic will be "Samba Multi-Channel/io_uring Status Update". He works as developer at SerNet and is a member of the Samba-Team as well. 

Both talks will be available in the "Day 1 Breakout Sessions" starting at 11:20am PDT (20:20 Uhr CEST). Registration for SDC 2020 is still possible.