Blog

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.

Ticket sales for the sambaXP 2020 have begun. SerNet will host the annual meeting of the international Samba community from 26 to 28 May 2020 at the Hotel Freizeit In in Göttingen. For the first time an SMB3 interoperability laboratory (IO-Lab) will be held parallel to the sambaXP.

The new IO-Lab format starts on May 24 and ends on May 29: On all days, a collaborative exchange for testing SMB3 implementations should be possible in a cooperative atmosphere. All participants can get involved in testing, identifying and fixing bugs in order to develop and improve interoperable products. Microsoft and SerNet provide networks and infrastructure for the IO-Lab. The participants define the testing process together and ensure that their goals are achieved.

The SerNet/Microsoft SMB3 IO-Lab offers

• the latest Windows client and server software from Microsoft, including test suites that help to verify interoperability for various functions of the SMB3 protocols,
• technical support for SMB3 engineers to investigate traces and help diagnose problems.

The participants of the interoperability laboratory are subject to a non-disclosure agreement and entry is restricted to registrants only.

Tickets for the conference as well as the IO-lab are available at an early bird price until 29 February 2020. In addition, a tutorial on Tuesday 26 May can be booked: Stefan Kania, longtime sambaXP speaker and samba trainer, will focus on the topic "CTDB".  Tickets and further information about the CfP can be found here: sambaxp.org.

The Call for Papers is also still running, submissions of papers are still welcome.

The sambaXP 2020 is sponsored by Google and Microsoft. This year's organiser is once again SerNet GmbH, which would like to use the conference to promote exchange between Samba developers and users from all over the world.

SerNet will be at the SNIA EMEA Storage Developer Conference 2020 in Tel Aviv from February 4 - 5, 2020. Both days will provide the opportunity to meet SerNet's Samba Team as well as SerNet Sales. Also there are lectures by Ralph Böhme and Volker Lendecke on the agenda.  

As part of the SMB3 Education Track on Tuesday (February 4) Volker Lendecke presents "Samba Scalability Improvements", starting at 14:55. Following at 15:50, Ralph Böhme hosts "Future of SMB in Samba".

On Wednesday, February 5, Volker Lendecke will talk about "Samba for integrators" (13:45). Check the abstract for more details.

Attendees are more than welcome to stop by at the SerNet booth and learn more about our support services, SAMBA+ packages as well as joint development projects.

The SAMBA+ software packages from SerNet are now also available for IBM's Unix operating system AIX. SAMBA+ AIX can be purchased as a subscription with a runtime of 1, 3 or 5 years in the SAMBA+ shop. The administration of the subscription as well as the download of SAMBA+ AIX is done via the open source system OPOSSO.

A decisive advantage of SerNet's AIX packages is the minimized dependency on third-party libraries or other external package sources. This is achieved by SAMBA+ AIX consisting of a tar ball with an installation script. This distinguishes SAMBA+ AIX from rpm-based packages on the market, which often have dependency problems and are not well tested.

By providing AIX packages, SerNet is responding to various customer requests. For AIX systems, the Samba software previously had to be compiled at great effort. In the past, SerNet's Samba team has often provided support and made individual adaptations. This is now obsolete due to the extensively tested and maintained SAMBA+ AIX software packages.

At SerNet, Björn Jacke, a long-time member of the international Samba team, worked primarily on the AIX packages. He has already gained a lot of experience in porting the Samba software for various Unix distributions or AIX customizations on customer request. Subscribers to the SAMBA+ AIX packages can now benefit from this know-how.

Volker Lendecke, SerNet co-founder and long-time Samba Team member, gave a  talk on "Integrating Storage Systems into Active Directory with winbind" at this year’s SDC EMEA (January 30, 2019 – Tel Aviv, Israel). The recording is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/w_r27Ono9TI (direct link).

From the abstract
Most environments use Active Directory as their primary authentication and authorization source. Users and groups are stored there. Any storage system must authenticate and authorize users in some way. Samba's winbind provides a solution to seamlessly integrate with Active Directory using the same mechanisms a native Windows client uses. It provides an API to authenticate users and retrieve authorization information like gorup memberships of authenticated users. Also, it can integrate into any kind of mappings scheme of Windows and Unix principals, and from there it can integrate Windows users into the Unix user database.

This talk will give an overview of the API that storage vendors and integrators can use to access winbind's services. This API is licensed LGPL and not GPL, so it does not put licensing restrictions on the storage software using it.

Learning outcomes:

1. Active Directory Authentication Mechanisms
2. Windows/Unix ID-mapping
3. Practical API description for accessing Active Directory

Download slides as PDF.