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For the 20th time SerNet organizes the Samba eXPerience (sambaXP), the conference around the open source software Samba – once again in 2021 as a digital event. From May 4 to 6, users from all over the world will meet. Tickets are now available on the conference website https://sambaxp.org, participation in sambaXP is free of charge. The call for papers has also started!

Due to the pandemic situation, the sambaXP organizing team is again focusing on a digital-only conference in 2021. The successful sambaXP 2020 has shown that this is possible and even offers some advantages, points out Nadine Dreymann, who is planning the conference for SerNet. "Thanks to the online format, speakers worldwide who otherwise - for various reasons - would not be able to travel to Göttingen have the opportunity to present their topics." Dreymann continues, "By making participation free, we also want to give even more people the opportunity to follow the conference live and get involved." Compared to last year's event, she says, sambaXP 2021 will therefore also be even more open and incorporate interactive elements so that the samba community can better interact.

Call for Papers

The call for papers for sambaXP 2021 is in progress. Presentations can be submitted via the conference page at https://sambaxp.org. Orga team and program committee are looking forward to interesting submissions. The presentations are scheduled on the conference days (Wednesday, May 5 and Thursday, May 6) for the period from 15:00 to 21:00 German time zone (CEST). For the final agenda, the best time slots in terms of time zone will be considered in consultation with the speakers. In addition, it is possible to record the talk beforehand in individual cases. 

Tutorials

The traditional tutorial by Stefan Kania will again be designed as a webinar on the day before the conference (Tuesday, May 4, 2021). The topic: ''Setting up Samba as a print server''. Tickets are available for 50 Euros. Björn Jacke (SerNet Samba Team) will also offer a free 2-hour workshop on "Integrate SAMBA+ AIX in an existing AD domain".

William Brown is a Senior Software Engineer at SUSE, located in Australia. His talk at sambaXP 2020 focused on "The Psychology of Multifactor Authentication". 

Abstract

Multi Factor Authentication is becoming more important in our infrastructure, with organisations starting to require it for sensitive accounts and more. So why does Multi Factor Authentication ... work? How does human behaviour influence our security and interact with threats that exist online? How can design and human interaction extend to making safer systems?

Come along and learn about human interaction and design, the psychology of how humans interact with systems. We'll extend this into security to understand why human error is really the fault of poor systems design. Finally we'll talk about different threats and how MFA works to protect us from them – at a psychological level.

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).

Samuel Cabrero and David Disseldorp (both work at Suse and are members of the Samba Team) talked about combining CephFS and Samba at this year's sambaXP 2020. 

Abstract

CephFS and Samba can be combined to provide a highly scalable filesystem which can be accessed from SMB clients such as Linux, Windows and macOS.

This talk looks at Samba clustering features under development, which aim to provide improved availability and performance, with a focus on:

• New RADOS dbwrap backend as an alternative to CTDB
• Fast Client failover with Witness Protocol as an alternative to tickles ACKs

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).

SAMBA+ 4.13.3 has just been released by SerNet. Packages for various SUSE and Red Hat platforms as well as for Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu are available now.

For details, please see the release notes for Samba 4.13.3.

SAMBA+ packages and all later versions are available as software subscription. They can be purchased at the SAMBA+ shop, detailed information and prices are listed at https://shop.samba.plus. The subscriptions are managed at our platform OPOSSO (https://oposso.samba.plus). Users can activate their subscriptions here and manage access credentials. The new SAMBA+ packages are included in existing subscriptions.

Sachin Prabhu and Michael Adam (both Red Hat) talked about the importance of testing at this year's sambaXP 2020. They demonstrated setting up an automated testing environment for Samba on Gluster.

Abstract

Testing is an extremely important part of the software development process. Luckily, a lot of the testing work is automated today. Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword. In Samba, we have come a long way from manually running tests (sometimes) to our own autobuild system enforcing a full run of the test-suite as a push-gate to running various tests in parallel in the gitlab ci system for each merge request.

While testing server client systems like Samba in an automated way is demanding already, testing a cluster is even more complicated and resource hungry. CTDB itself has been tested in isolation with local processes since the beginning, and recently a test-environment has been added to Samba’s selftest that helps test the samba+ctdb stack entirely with local process and socket wrapper. But an automated, periodic test of a samba and ctdb setup on top of a real clustered file system is still missing. One aspect why this is not so easy to implement is the fact that it would usually require a couple of virtual machines to set up such a test cluster.

This presentation introduces a project that we recently started to investigate and work on. It aims to create a periodic test run pulling the latest bits of Samba and Gluster, setting up a cluster and running test suites against it. Errors would be reported to both projects. As compute resources for the test runs, the centos-ci is used. This project provides jenkins-managed bare metal server resources for open source projects to integrate into their CI systems. These servers are powerful enough to run realistic cluster setups in virtual machines. The presentation demonstrates how the centos-ci resources are integrated into this test system. Furthermore, possibilities are explored, how to integrate centos-ci resources as additional runners for Samba’s gitlab CI runners.

(Slides as PDF)

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).