On 06/17/2013 10:13 AM, Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 17 June 2013, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. sent:
why is SAMBA still around?,,,I always thought the Open Source Universe
was about finding and using software that "Just Worked"?
When it comes to interfacing your open source, open standards OS, with a
closed source, non-standard, ever-changing-standards, OS, implementing
something that works is a serious challenge. It's the evil side of the
equation that's the real problem.
But you're trying to bridge together two systems that work in
fundamentally different ways. So you've got to do things to handle the
differences, or lose out where there is no direct equivalent, and put up
with annoying workarounds.
File and directory permissions are one thing. The evil OS doesn't have
execute permissions, so the simplistic solution is to treat all files as
if the execute permission is set. That has annoying repercussions.
Some of the evil OS distributions had no concept of different users, so
everyfile was available to anyone. Or no direct way of dealing with a
file owned by me, with different r/w permissions for a usergroup, and
different r/w permissions for other users. So file permissions get
mangled into dopey defaults as they pass from one system to another.
User accounts are handled differently on each computer, so you need some
point of translation that "tim" on Linux is "Tim" on Windows. Or
perhaps "tim" on Windows is "ts1201" on Linux, to be even more painful.
Windows SMB depends on a machine being in charge (the browse master),
that machine handles identifying which machine is which amongst all of
the clients. They hold an election between all machines on the LAN, to
see who's the biggest and best, and that one wins. If another machine
joins the network, an election gets held again. If a machine leaves the
network (or drops off, leaving everyone else in the lurch, since it
doesn't have any concept of actually logging off), the rest of the
clients can get left in limbo for a quarter of an hour before another
browser master takes over. It gets worse if anybody's IP changed in the
meantime, because you can't just simply find it a that the same IP you
used previously. I've watched people end up having to reboot every
Windows box on a LAN just to get Windows file sharing working again. To
quote part of an internet meme, it's designed by frickin' idiots.
The underlying system that Samba lets us access is a complete mess, like
everything that Microsoft does. If they ever did anything in a
sensible, and user-friendly manner, it'd be a shock. So, I avoid it
like the plague. I see no point in going through hell trying to
configure Samba to print, when I can simply configure the Windows
nuisance box to use the CUPS server, directly. And it can be easier to
install a NFS client on Windows to access a Linux file server, than mess
around with Samba.
Using Windows is as much fun as going to the dentist.
WOW!.....I guess I'll have to ditch my SAMBA 3 whitepapers and look into
the NFS thingie some more! And I assume the NFS has "workable" access
and file permissioning? in a bi-directional state? Hmm....still don't
know why everyone thinks Windows is the best and brightest?!....
EGO II
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