LCA 2006: Samba 4 -- Oh My!
Posted: Thu, 26 January 2006 | permalink | No comments
It's always worth catching a talk from Andrew Tridgell. He's very funny, informative, and always makes his topic accessable to the entire audience.
This year's Tridge Talk was on Samba 4, which has just released it's first technology preview. As always, the room was packed -- I really feel for any speaker who's in a parallel session against Tridge, because he's always such a big drawcard, no matter what the topic.
The technology in Samba 4 is quite impressive. They've built their own LDAP server, since OpenLDAP is quite strict in it's standards compliance, and that's the last thing you want when you're trying to interoperate with Microsoft. They needed a Kerberos server as well, but in this case Heimdal Kerberos is suitable and nicely integrated. There's also some very strange stuff inside -- for example, there's an embedded JavaScript engine inside, to drive the all-new, hypercool, AJAX-enabled SWAT. Yes, you read that right, parts of Samba 4 are powered by JavaScript.
But of course, a talk is always so much more impressive with a demo. The chosen feature was the entertainingly named "Vampire tap" functionality -- "now with longer fangs". You take a Win2k3 domain controller, a Windows XP workstation joined to that domain, and a Samba 4 server. Point the Samba server's fangs at the Win2k3 box, wait a few seconds, shut down the Win2k3 server, change a couple of settings in Samba, restart the Samba service, and then log in again on the Windows XP machine.
It all Just Worked.
I avoid supporting Windows machines wherever possible, but when such an eventuality is unavoidable, it looks like Samba 4 will make the process significantly less painful.
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