
Samba versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects - fredley
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/18/kill-zones-r-us.html
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bediger4000
So we've now got legal weapons against any changes: Terms of Service, software
patents, the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, stronger "Intellectual
Property" laws world-wide, etc etc.

I see this as part of an effort by society to lock down change, to make the
current socio-economic order static, to keep the winners from becoming losers,
and vice versa. I'm not entirely sure what's causing this reaction, other than
a general fear of change.

~~~
closeparen
People are free to enter contracts stipulating just about anything. Society
may decide that certain terms are unconscionable, or that certain
circumstances can't lead to a valid contract, but it's generally a "default
allow" policy. Contracts being enforceable in the technology realm doesn't
mean there's an "effort by society" to do anything; it would take effort to
make them unenforceable.

The intellectual property system is explicitly provided for in the
Constitution; it's not a "reaction" to anything recent. Though I do think the
shape of its application to software and digital media comes from impartial
parties not having a good understanding, and competent parties being motivated
to protect their interests.

~~~
bediger4000
The intellectual property system in the USA has grown well beyond the
constitutional motivation of increasing the public domain. Giving a copyright
for life + 70 years hardly gives anyone the motivation to increase the size of
the public domain, but it does give them the motivation to game the system to
PREVENT CHANGE.

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jchw
On the software patents front: the only winner here are the pockets of
lawyers. Large tech companies are all in a state of constant litigation, and
nowadays filing patents defensively is pretty standard in tech.

I absolutely loathe where we’re at with software patents, but I have
absolutely zero faith it will ever be fixed, so I guess anyone without
billions to acquire a patent portfolio will just have to forget it.

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jra_samba
A brief history of Samba, but pretty accurate for all that ! Of course, the
devil was in the details (and in the EU anti-trust case), but that's a story
for another era :-).

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tw04
This doesn't even make sense... both S3 and Azure Blob have been reverse
engineered by countless companies - no lawsuits in sight.

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raverbashing
You mean this S3?
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html)

~~~
tw04
Yes, I do mean that S3. The one with a link on how to utilize their API as a
CLIENT. Notice it lacks any source code for setting up an S3 SERVER of any
sort, which is why companies have had to reverse engineer it.

It's also why anytime a third party says they support S3 - you have to ask
EXACTLY what they support. I've yet to run into anybody claiming to be 100%
compatible as the "standard" is constantly changing.

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cardamomo
I remember setting up Samba on a Debian file server in about 2007. (It was my
first experience with Linux!) Ironically, all of the computers networked with
the server were Macs.

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AdmiralAsshat
TIL: Samba and SMB are not the same thing.

This is why setting up your network shares by copy-pasting commands you found
on a StackOverflow page and tweaking them until they work is a bad idea.

~~~
RosanaAnaDana
Go on..

~~~
mmphosis

       # SMB1 Mac OS X 10.5.8
          ntlm auth = yes
    

I should probably just switch to NFS.

~~~
JudgeWapner
Yeah so your whole system can freeze when something goes wrong. If the server
is down, so is the umount command.

~~~
ciupicri
Even with the soft option?

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derpherpsson
Aaah.. SAMBA :D

I read the samba hacker guide and how they had reverse-engineered the
protocols over the years. MS Windows is not even compatible with ITSELF ffs
lol ;D

~~~
jra_samba
That was then but this is now :-). Microsoft now employ Samba Team members,
fully document all the protocols used by Windows and help other vendors
implement them.

This is not your father's Microsoft :-).

~~~
rini17
I'll bite.

How is it then possible that Windows10/Samba interop is more problematic as in
my father's times? Unless there was a domain, it worked pretty much out of the
box before.

Now:
[https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10](https://serverfault.com/search?q=samba+windows+10)

~~~
jra_samba
It certainly isn't more problematic. You should see the volume of complaints
we _used_ to get :-).

A lot of the issues are usually around authentication and user mapping.
Kerberos is complex, and Unix people don't understand Active Directory. That's
usually the core of it. Once you get a connection things mostly just work
(except for Windows ACLs, for which I blame the Linux kernel developers who
refuse to add Andreas Grunbachers RichACL patch set for ideological reasons).

Sadly enough, if you want ACLs to "just work" on Linux you have to use a
license-incompatible ZFS backend for which Samba has native ACL support. Or
just use ZFS-on-FreeBSD where the license isn't a problem.

It's one Linux filesystem developer in particular who is blocking the RichACL
patch, who is known to be,... shall we say... "difficult" ?

~~~
amaccuish
Samba stores the ACLS in xattrs right? So they only problem is that they're
not applied locally on the host?

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new_realist
Samba is a terrible piece of software, and under GPLv3 to boot. Combined, this
is why no real vendors use it, only the poor.

Further, it is laughable that the DMCA would apply to SMB.

~~~
jra_samba
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Google and IBM are both Samba users. As is
Nutanix, Panzura and a whole host of on-prem -> Cloud gateway companies.

You have a strange definition of poor :-).

~~~
noinsight
Do you mean for file sharing or as a directory server? File sharing I can
definitely understand but I'm more skeptical about the directory server
functionality.

Big companies have the resources to do many weird things but it would still
strike me as odd to be running Samba DS in production.

How far along is the directory server these days in terms of stability and
features?

~~~
bertjk
Hmm what is the modern file sharing thing that we are supposed to use that is
not Samba? if I wanted to share some directories on my LAN that can be
browsed/read/written to by non-technical users without extra software what is
the right thing to use these days?

~~~
jra_samba
Why are you not supposed to use Samba ? Samba works great as an SMB 2/3+ file
server. Both Mac's and Windows use SMB3 as their native file sharing protocol,
and Microsoft employ the cifsfs (SMB3+) linux kernel client maintainer.

It's just easier to keep using SMB3 :-).

