[Discuss] Samba4

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Warren Luebkeman wrote:
> ...we released the latest version of...which is a free/open source
> Linux domain controller based on Samba4.
> If [you are] an IT shop or consultant, I think it could be quite useful
> for you.

I don't mean to disparage the project mentioned here, which I am not
familiar with, and may in fact be an excellent packaging of Samba, but
it does raise the question of whether it is still a wise recommendation
for "an IT shop or consultant" to be deploying Samba, unless their
customers are already well invested in it.

When I first started using Samba I thought it was a fantastic idea, and
I though the old-school UNIX guys that disparaged it were just being
anti-Microsoft, but after using it for a decade I came to view it as a
mess of a protocol with an unreliable and insecure authentication model.

I'm sure with enough care and feeding it can be coerced into behaving
well, but my experience with small scale deployments is that I've
inevitably ran into unexplainable situations where share security had to
be relaxed in order to accomplish what was needed. I've never had that
experience with NFS. And that's not even getting into performance
comparisons.

Of course it isn't fair to simply compare NFS to Samba, as Samba also
encompass name resolution and network-based authentication, but these
only make the situation more complicated, and the inevitable failures
harder to diagnose.

Would you choose to deploy Samba on a newly setup network?
Have your experiences with Samba been different?

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/