Samba 4 milestones reached

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sat 06 November 2004}

• SPNEGO over HTTP works (abartlet)
• Samba 4 has its first user (tridge)

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MS RPC flaws

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Tue 19 October 2004}

Now that I’ve been working with MSRPC extensively for some time, I’m actually starting to like it ! Although things could’ve been less complex (NDR alignment, for example) the protocol itself is actually quite clean and nicely set up.

Some of the major flaws in MSRPC are (imho):

• Overly complex. A couple percents of performance boost (if at all) by doing alignment of data types is not worth the trouble.
• Once you have a certain interface the only way to change an existing method’s parameters is adding a new method with the new parameters.
• Not everybody who works with MSRPC completely understands what it’s doing and how it works. This has been the cause of quite a few flawed interfaces (the winreg interface for example), causing security flaws and inefficiency.

One of the nice things about RPC (and perhaps also one of it’s problems) is it’s flexibility. The encoding can be changed as well as the transport that’s being used.

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Rewrite progressing

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Thu 16 September 2004}

Finally, the rewrite of the registry subsystem in Samba 4 is starting to finish off. I changed some major things after the initial version:

• Changed from typedefs back to structs, like we do in the rest of Samba 4 (e.g. struct registry_key instead of REG_KEY.
• Pass TALLOC_CTX‘s around for memory allocation. No longer give every key or value it’s own TALLOC_CTX.
• A registry context is nothing but a collection of hives that all have their own root key. In the previous version, there was one registry context with multiple roots. (this makes the backend code much, much simpler)

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samba-docs build system used for AMANDA

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Wed 15 September 2004}

Stefan Weichinger has used the samba-docs build system for the documentation of AMANDA, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver.

Preview is available here. Very neat stuff!

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