Where Samba has come from and where it might be going

[Jeremy McClintock]

So, intrigued by the subject-line, I had this email string hanging out in my box for several weeks, calling for me to read it.  And I'm very glad I finally got the time to do so!

Our company is still relatively small, but looking at a good deal of potential growth in the coming years.  We have a pretty broad geographical range (two offices & 10 stores over the Greater Pittsburgh, PA area, plus one office in NYC).  Our current server infrastructure is almost entirely cloud-based (RackSpace, but looking at migrating to AWS) running on a Resara (RIP) PDC, but over the past couple months I've been working to stand-up a brand-new, entirely cloud-based domain utilizing CentOS 6.5, Sernet-Samba 4.1, BIND 9.9.5, & ISC DHCPd.

Prior to this project, my experience with Samba management at this level was quite minimal, and the learning curve here has been huge (and awesome)!  So far I've managed to get our PDC mostly operational, and am now working hard to bring up our file/print server (just finished the "add it to the domain" stage).  Being that most of this has been entirely new for me, and being a HUGE advocate of leveraging the cloud, I'm quite enthusiastic about this opportunity!

I'm really interested in getting involved at a much deeper level, and have scoured as much as possible for any sort of training (CBT, in-person, or otherwise) with no luck.  So I'm ready to dive-in head first and just start learning as much as I can with the trial-by-fire method!  I haven't had much time to keep up with the email threads lately so I'm not sure if any of this discussion has progressed, but I was hoping that I could touch base with one (or more) of you to discuss the possibility of being able to contribute to the overall Samba Project as I work through this new infrastructure!

Any thoughts/feedback/ideas/etc. are absolutely welcome, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Thanks so much!

Respectfully,
 
Jeremy M. McClintock
Technology Operations Manager
American Natural
Direct:: 412/505.7983
Mobile: 724/504.2562
Email:   jmcclintock at americannatural.com
 
Main:      412/489.9981
Address: 1200 Lebanon Road, Suite 440, West Mifflin, PA 15122

-----Original Message-----
From: samba-technical-bounces at lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-technical-bounces at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Bartlett
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 6:04 PM
To: Richard Sharpe
Cc: John Terpstra; samba-technical at samba.org
Subject: Re: Where Samba has come from and where it might be going

On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 08:06 -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 9:54 AM, John Terpstra 
> <john.terpstra.samba at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I urge all of us to enthusiastically enable broad adoption of Samba 
> > into the cloud environment -
> 
> So, what does it mean to "enable broad adoption"? It sounds nice, but 
> that won't get us anywhere, I suspect.
> 
> I can see several possibilities, and surely I have missed some or many:
> 
> 1. Simple VFS modules to allow Samba to store files on S3 or Google's cloud etc.
> 
> 2. More complete VFS modules that provide something like CTDB but 
> optimized for higher latency WAN-like situations. This would allow 
> those with geographically distributed environments to make better use 
> of the "cloud" and is something I am intimately familiar with.

We certainly get requests for that often enough. 

> 3. Allowing Samba to function in OpenStack.

I read Simo's slide deck from SambaXP, and agree, those really are interesting opportunities.  Without stretching myself too thin, I'm hoping to have more to do with OpenStack and samba stuff.

http://sambaxp.org/fileadmin/user_upload/SambaXP2014-DATA/thu/Simo_Sorce-openstackandsamba.pdf

> 4. ...
> 
> Now, I suspect that we are going to need to understand what each of 
> these requires and then make the appropriate changes or find people to 
> make the appropriate changes ...
> 
> Also, I think there will always be two aspects to this:
> 
> 1. Technological. That is, what neat new technologies do people want 
> to work on, and
> 
> 2. Organizational. Who can find the time and experience to contribute.
> That is, either with their own resources (time, etc.) or by working for 
> companies that need solutions that layer on the base in this area.

I wonder if we get a bit of 2 by being excited about 1?  Now just to find a salesperson to sell them the dream! :-)

Andrew Bartlett

--
Andrew Bartlett
http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba





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