Samba OS Systems...

[Fred Pishotta]

Greetings,

A little off topic, but at least it's not a complaint.

Samba, as we know, is wonderful.  I truly enjoyed my Sun PC/NFS
disk/documentation bonfire.  I operate Samba on some Sparc 10's running
Solaris 2.5 and 2.6, mixed in with Win/NT 4.0 servers at SP3.  Everybody
(almost) at this site uses Win95 and WinNT PCs, but needs access to
unix disk space for some other purposes.  Samba bridges that gap.  I guess
I've been lucky, since I haven't had any major problems.

I wanted to comment that the Samba experience has caused me to look at
the rather expensive proprietary unix systems I operate with some
suspicion.  Not that there isn't a need for some unix, but at what price?
So I downloaded over the net (in a most amazing automated way), a copy of
FreeBSD with the XFree86 windowing system (www.freebsd.org) and installed
it on a pentium/133 system that was available to me before it goes on to
other things, and the experience has been wonderful (so far).  Performance
wise, the PC (now operating with something resembling a brain) dances
rings around the Sparc 10, and the BSD unix implementation is one of the
most complete I have seen.  [ I suspect Linux is comparable in these
respects, but I had to choose one to look at first; so, linux users, my
apologies. The real point is the open systems vs. the proprietary ones. ]

It is amazing how loosely federated groups spread out over the world,
connected primarily by the internet, can manage to put together packages
like Samba/XFree86/Linux/FreeBSD of such complexity, that provide such
valuable service, that work so well, for virtually no money. While
others, spurred on by wet dreams of corporate empire, try, ironically, to
cram disguised and extremely inept reimplementations of unix down our
throats, and have the gall to call it "N"ew "T"echnology. The
latter group disgusts me, but the former provides me with some hope for
humankind.

-- Fred P.