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. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.8.13-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon May 13 13:36:17 UTC 2013 x86_64 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
