Implementing Samba in Containers

[John Mulligan]

Hi List,

I wanted to follow up on something that I learned from a thread on the user's
list [1] recently.  Specifically, that I'm not the only one working on
"containerizing" samba components.  Some readers may be aware of my container
efforts if you attended our talk at sambaxp, or saw the recording [2]. While we
focused quite a bit on the Kubernetes parts there I want to skip over
Kubernetes in this mail and focus on the (OCI) container images.

Michael Adam started a project [3] to build container images for Samba. We 
publish our images on quay.io [4]. I have
been involved there for a little under a year now. We mainly have been focused
on our immediate needs but I wanted to reach out and see who may be interested
in collaborating on containerizing Samba.

In the samba-containers project we have three images that are built:
* A file server image
* A client image (smbclient)
* An AD DC image

The file server is my main focus for our Kubernetes efforts. The other two
images we are generally using only for test and are currently very simplistic.
But I'd like to see all the images become generally useful, so that's why I'm
writing this - to seek out any parties in the wider Samba community who may be
interesting collaborating on this effort - or even just discussing
containerization of Samba.  I would also like to re-emphasize that despite the
name of the Org in the project url, none of it is meant to be Kubernetes
specific. I'd personally be thrilled to see it get used in other contexts, with
other orchestration systems, docker-compose, or direct docker & podman. More
eyes on the project from others who aren't focused on k8s can help keep us
honest. :-)

In conclusion, I'd like to hear from anyone reading this if you're interested
in samba in containers, even if you're not so interested in our particular
efforts - but especially if you are :-). I'm curious if anyone wants to know 
more about the nuts-and-bolts of how we're designing the current containers 
and if you have feedback. In addition, if you are already running samba in
containers or have your own images, I'd love to hear about them and any
challenges or successes you've had.

Thanks for your time!


[1] - Thread Parent: https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2021-June/
236451.html
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-Jxaf8_gw
[3] - https://github.com/samba-in-kubernetes/samba-container
[4] - https://quay.io/samba.org

-- John M.