LinuxWorld: Samba's Jerry Carter talks Samba's future

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LinuxWorld: Samba's Jerry Carter talks Samba's future

NEW YORK CITY -- Following his session on user authentication and Samba 3.0 at the LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit, Jerry Carter answered a few questions on Samba's future and its role with Microsoft.

What do you see coming next in Samba?

Jerry Carter: Active Directory domain control is in the best interest of the community and developers. We plan on making performance improvements to Winbind and logon support. There will be security and DNS updates. There will of course be a bunch of Vista related patches as well. Samba has an evolutionary development model, and over the next six months -- in the production code, the 3.0 code – we will focus on compatibility with Microsoft service packs.

A lot of people have a problem with the fact that many applications today are not Kerberized. Are there changes coming to address that?

Carter: Yes. The goal of companies like Centeris is to provide a common layer for application development. In the MIT Kerberos 1.5 build, there is a common platform for application support. Centeris is also making a push by putting money behind a patch for projects that need Kerberos support. Our goal is essentially to provide a common playing field for interoperability. I think even Samba could be broken up even more than it is.

On the research side, with Samba 4.0, how defensive is Microsoft about releasing info to you – like its APIs?

Carter: Have you ever tried to take a

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steak away from a rottweiler? Like they say though, if you want to learn French you have to sit in a French café and learn it. All we do [at samba] is stare at packets and network traffic. Active Directory is mostly standardized, so we look at the traffic and see what works. A big thing about Samba and bugs is if Windows does it and we don't it's considered a bug. No Windows client is going to use a port that it wasn't designed to use. It's as simple as that.