Samba News And New Team Blog

[ Thanks to Félim Whiteley
for this link. ]

“Firstly, we now have a Samba Team member working at
Microsoft ! Congratulations to Chris Hertel, who was offered an
opportunity to work directly with Microsoft to create a new set of
SMB/CIFS protocol documentation. This will be published as part of
the MCPP/WSPP set and made freely available from Microsoft’s
website.

“This is the first Microsoft-sponsored SMB/CIFS documentation to
be made available without restrictions since the 1997 IETF draft
specifications. The first new document, [MS-CIFS], covers the SMB
protocol as implemented in Windows NT. It is almost 500 pages at
present, and is just entering the review and markup stage. It
should be available in a few months.

“In order to work with Microsoft on this project, Chris had to
found a consulting company and hire a few people.

“Volker Lendecke has been re-writing winbind, making it
asynchronous. Here are the details:

“In ancient days, winbind was just a single process. Later on
came a separate deamon to update a cache, so that the main code
paths in winbind would not be blocked by slow domain controllers or
the network being slow to enumerate thousands of users. In an
environment where winbind has to authenticate thousands of users
from all over the world this can become a bit slow. So with 3.0.20,
winbind was turned into a multi-process daemon. One asynchronous
main daemon that in good Unix tradition is supported by several
helper processes. This architecture made winbind asynchronous for
all important code paths. In particular Windows clients logging
into a Samba server running winbind could not block winbind from
replying to other requests.”

Complete
Story