developerWorks: Interview: Taking Samba beyond POSIX

If you were lucky enough to attend the Samba eXPerience
conference in Göttingen, Germany, you may have caught Samba
creator Andrew Tridgell’s talk on ‘Exotic Filesystem Backends.’

“And what exactly does Tridge have to say about exotic
filesystem backends? It turns out that since being hired by IBM’s
Almaden Research Center in January of this year, the Australian
hacker has been working on pushing Samba beyond the POSIX world and
figuring out what work needs to be done to get Samba to support new
filesystems such as XFS, ext3, and Storage Tank. The answer is
nothing less than a complete rewrite of Samba’s smbd code, which
has become his latest pet project.

“developerWorks: What kind of work are you
doing at IBM?

“Tridgell: I wasn’t hired as just a Samba
person. In fact, I joined the Almaden Research Labs, which are
looking a bit further out than just a product around the corner. My
job description isn’t just Samba stuff, although at the moment the
particular research project that I’m working on is a
network-attached storage project, where we’re looking at
next-generation NAS solutions and integrating that with some of the
exotic filesystems that IBM’s developing. It’s quite interesting
work, and it gives me the opportunity to do work that’s a bit
longer term. While I was at Quantum and at VA [Tridgell’s two
previous employers –ed.], I was constantly running across
limitations in the core structure of Samba. In order to ship
products on a three- or four-month type time scale, we really just
had to have workarounds for those core limitations, and it meant we
had to have some poor compromises, particularly in the area of NT
Access Control Lists [ACLs] and lack of support for things like
file streams, or some compromises in the area of user and group
management. They were just pragmatic compromises, because we didn’t
have the luxury to really say, ‘Well, let’s rewrite all of
Samba…'”

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