Blog

For sambaXP 2021 Björn Jacke, longtime member of the international Samba Team and SerNet's AIX expert, has hosted a tutorial. We provide the recording of "Integrate SAMBA+ AIX in an existing AD domain" in our YouTube channel.

SAMBA+ AIX are SerNet’s Samba packages for IBM's AIX Unix operating system. The packages have minimal dependencies on third-party libraries or other external package sources – but come with a lot of advantages and support a lot of features. Please have a look at the basics on our SAMBA+ AIX information page. Also, our team will be happy to help with any questions or to get more in-depth technical details on SAMBA+ AIX. Get in contact with them via mail to contact@remove-this.sernet.com.

In his sambaXP 2020 talk, Mairo Rufus presented his results from Googles Summer of code 2019. Mentored by Samba team member Aurélien Aptel, Rufus worked on improving smbcmp. He received his Master in Computer Science last year at Polytechnic Yaounde, Cameroon.

Abstract

Smbcmp is a cli tool for making diffs between two pcap files containing SMB packets and rendering them using curses. For the first part of the project we had to make better diffs by using the pdml output of Tshark and for the second part we added a GUI and ported smbcmp to Windows.

Slides

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming month. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).

The program for this year's sambaXP May 4-6, 2021 is online. It is the 20th conference in this series and, like last year, will again take place purely virtually via Zoom. The agenda is filled with exciting talks for developers and users. Tickets can be booked via the conference website at https://sambaXP.org. Participation in sambaXP and the IO Lab is free of charge.

The sambaXP 2021 is sponsored by Google, Microsoft and SerNet.

sambaXP 2021 workshops and lectures

The traditional workshop day on May 4th will again kick off sambaXP. This year Stefan Kania will deal with the topic "Setting up Samba as a print server" from 3 pm to 9:30 pm CEST. The participation fee for this is 50 euros. A free two-hour workshop on "Integrating SAMBA+ AIX into an existing AD domain" will be offered by Björn Jacke from SerNet.

To enable as many people as possible worldwide to participate, the presentations will also start at 3 pm (CEST) on May 5. Nadine Dreymann from the organizing committee of SerNet: "Last year we saw excellent results with the virtual conference and were able to bring participants and speakers from different time zones together."  Jeremy Allison, chairman of sambaXP, kicks things off with his talk on using samba code in Google Chromebooks.  This year's topics include development insights such as "Samba AD DC Cockpit UI" and "Reverse engineering the Windows SMB server," as well as application experiences "Troubleshooting clustered Samba in Enterprise environments" and "Experience running a clustered Samba gateway for CERNBox." 

Among the speakers, SerNet's Samba team is also represented with current topics: 

• Stefan Metzmacher: Samba Multi-Channel/io_uring Status Update.
• Ralph Böhme: The New VFS 
• Volker Lendecke: Socket activation for Samba's RPC services

Details on all presentations can be found on the conference page.

SMB Interoperability Lab 

A Microsoft-sponsored SMB Interoperability Lab (IO Lab) will also be held online from Wednesday to Friday (May 5, 3 pm to May 7, 9 pm CEST). In the IO Lab, participants* will collaboratively test their implementations of SMB3, identify and troubleshoot issues in a collaborative environment.  SMB implementations that are still in the development phase are also welcome. The IO Lab is sponsored by Microsoft and conducted in Microsoft Teams.

As part of sambaXP 2021 an SMB Interoperability Lab (IO Lab) will take place online from Wednesday to Friday (May 5th 3:00 pm to 7th 9:00 pm). During the lab participants work together and test, identify and fix bugs in a collaborative setting. This IO Lab is sponsored and featured by Microsoft.

The virtual sambaXP 2021 itself is set for May 4 to 6. Tickets are available on the conference website https://sambaxp.org, participation in sambaXP as well as the IO Lab is free of charge. The call for papers is also still open.

The purpose of this IO Lab is for vendors to bring their implementations of SMB3 to test, identify, and fix bugs in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products. The 2021 SMB3 IO Lab will be held online using a virtual private network, creating a collaborative framework for testing.  The participants of the IO Lab work together to define the testing process, assuring that objectives are accomplished.

The IO Lab offers access to:

• The latest Windows client and server software from Microsoft, including test suites that help verify interoperability on various features of SMB protocols
• Technical support from SMB engineers to look at traces and help with diagnosing problems
• IO Lab participants are covered by a non-disclosure agreement and access is restricted to registrants only

Please register if you are interested in attending and see the agenda for upcoming new details during the next weeks.

Note from the Organizer

If you are reluctant to participate because you feel that your SMB implementation is "not ready", you should still participate! The SMB Interoperability Lab is also a development opportunity, not just a testing opportunity. Implementations still in development are encouraged to participate.  It's a great opportunity to get help and learn from the experts!

In his sambaXP 2020 talk Douglas Bagnall (Catalyst) illustrates the improvements for Samba achieved by the transition to Python 3.  Bagnall is located in Wellington / New Zealand and member of the international Samba team.

Abstract

Samba, particularly the AD part, is riddled with Python. The transition from Python 2 to Python 3 was painful. Now that is over and we have the sudden benefit from a decade of language and library development. Some of the changes are actually quite useful, including an improved debugging infrastructure and built-in asynchronous concepts.

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming month. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).