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In this sambaXP 2020 recording Martin Schwenke and Amitay Isaacs give their "CTDB Report 2020".  Martin Schwenke is an Open Source Developer at IBM (LinkedIn), Amitay Isaacs also works at IBM as Software Engineer (GitHub). Both are located in Australia and are members of the international Samba team. 

Abstract

The report focuses on 2 main areas: progress and plans. What is new upstream in CTDB? What do our plans look like compared to those presented in recent years? There is also the intersection of progress and plans: what useful things are sitting in development branches but are not merged?

Progress includes: Clustered Samba testing is now in Samba's test suite and autobuild, CTDB's inter-node TCP transport is now more resilient (with some pain along the way), database vacuuming has been simplified, the recovery lock has been enhanced, code is generally cleaner (largely due to csbuild showing issues) and there have been many improvements in testing.

Plans include: splitting CTDB into multiple daemons (as previously presented), a transport using datagram messaging and simple code for new developers to understand and embrace. Slides (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).

In this recording of the sambaXP 2020 Tom Talpey gives the already traditional annual "SMB3 Protocol Update". Talpey (LinkedIn) is an architect at Microsoft, focusing on the SMB protocol.

Abstract

The SMB3 protocol has updated in the past year, with compression in 2019 and further updates in the Windows "20H1" Spring release. We'll review and recap the protocol since the last SambaXP, and also provide a look forward, including an update on recent developments in RDMA to enable "Push Mode" for ultra-low-latency remote access to persistent Storage Class Memory via SMB3 and SMB Direct. Slides (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).

For the first time the Samba eXPerience 2020 took place completely online. Recordings of the talks are now available as videos on sambaxp.org - including Stefan Kania's workshop on CTDB / GlusterFS.

The 19th edition of the international conference around the open source software Samba took place from 26th - 28th May 2020 for the first time exclusively digitally. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet can offer all talks as videos for the first time. 

The sambaXP 2020 was sponsored by Google and Microsoft.

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

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."