DebCamp / DebConf9

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Wed 22 July 2009}

So far I’m very much enjoying my first DebCamp / DebConf. It’s nice to finally meet a lot of people in person that I have worked together with or talked to on IRC in the last few years. Cáceres is a relatively small town with a nice old city center.

I arrived early for DebCamp and spent the first few days here working on fixing bugs in the Bazaar and Samba packages as well as discussing the integration between Samba 4 and Kerberos with Sam (both in general and on Debian specifically). In trying to set up a Samba 4 domain we found a number of bugs in the provisioning script, most of which seem to be fixed now.

In the last few days I’ve mostly worked on getting Samba 4 and OpenChange ready to go into Sid (they’re in experimental only at the moment) and have discussed bzr-builddeb and related Bazaar issues with James.

Currently Playing: Pixies - Velouria

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DebConf

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 04 July 2009}

I’m looking forward to going to my first DebCamp/DebConf. I won’t be giving a talk, but I hope to work together with others on integrating Samba 3 and 4 better with the rest of the system and VCS integration.

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“Franky” Talk at SambaXP

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Thu 04 June 2009}

I’ll be giving a talk at the next NLLGG meeting about the Franky project.

Update: Slides

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SambaXP 2009

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 20 April 2009}

Last week most of the Samba team met again for our annual conference in Göttingen. It was nice seeing everybody again, specially the folks I hadn’t seen since the last one.

Together with Andrew and his wife Kirsty I took the train from Amsterdam into Germany a couple of days early and we did some sightseeing together with Anatoli and Nadezhda during the weekend. There’s still plenty of things to discover in Göttingen for me, even though I’ve already been there about two dozen times. We did a tour of the city walls, visited some of the churches and climbed the tower.

Julien’s talk about OpenChange was interesting and humorous as always. Volkers’ tutorial on asynchronous programming in C. Even though I’ve spent quite some time working with and looking at these API’s it was nice going through them step by step once again. It’s a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Andrew and I also gave our yearly “State of Samba 4” talk again. As I’ve mentioned in other places, I’m really excited about the social effects of the Franky project. Once again I was reminded that giving a talk the morning after the conference party (this year in the “Oriental Lounge”) is a bad idea.

Several of my fellow Debian Samba maintainers made it to SambaXP, it was nice to see Christian, Luk, Michael and Noël there. We made some decisions about the direction of the Samba packages, and a plan to allow the Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages to be installed on the same system. Unfortunately I had to miss Christian’s talk because it was in the same timeslot as Jeff’s talk about the CIFS kernel module.

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Reconciling the Samba 3 and Samba 4 source code trees

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 15 September 2008}

While a few of us have been working very hard on Samba 4 to allow it to rock your socks off as an Active Directory Domain Controller, some of the other Samba developers have been working just as hard on improving the existing Samba 3 codebase and adding features to that. This situation has caused tension between developers as well as technical problems in the past - code with the same purpose is being developed in parallel, libraries diverge because features are only added in one branch and not in the other, one codebase is considered “obsolete” by some and the other is considered only a playground for experimental features by others.

As of yesterday, we now have the two codebases living in one and the same git branch. This should make it a lot easier for the two to use the same libraries. Better yet, it should allow us to reconcile the copies of various libraries that exist in both codebases, all of which have diverged to some degree in the last few years.

After a few problems came up merging the two branches the easy way (they both have a directory called “source” and git doesn’t deal well with renaming them to “source3” and “source4” respectively), we decided to replay the history of both branches . This has the disadvantage that all existing branches that are based on the Samba 3 and Samba 4 branches will have to be rebased against the new master branch, but it also means we keep the ability to run “git log” inside of our source directories and having it work right.

Other than the fact that this makes it possible to share more code between the two codebases, one of the ideas we have is also to see if it is possible to provide an Active Directory DC by glueing the best bits of Samba 3 and Samba 4 together (aka “Franky“) before they are eventually merged completely.

Currently Playing: Phideaux - Formaldehyde

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SambaXP and other travel

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sat 26 April 2008}

It’s been a busy two weeks. Wilco and I drove up to Göttingen on Sunday two weeks ago to spend some days hacking and meeting up with the other developers before the start of SambaXP. It was really nice to see everybody again after more than 7 months.

SambaXP was a bit different this year. There were three tracks during the second part of the conference this year, one more than previously and of course, there were several engineers from Microsoft attending this time! Some of the interesting talks this year included Julien’s update on OpenChange, Tridge’s talk on PFIF, the talk from the likewise folks and of course the talk from Microsofts’ Wolfgang Grieskamp on SMB2. We also had some other informal discussions with the Microsoft folks about specific topics - very useful!

There are some photos up on the SambaXP homepage. And just to be ahead of the comments: yes, I know I need a haircut.

I did some initial work on several bits and pieces of code that I hope to expand over the next few months. Volker has started working on ncacn_ip_tcp support and I have been working on making the Samba 3 DCE/RPC library compatible with Samba 4. This should allow OpenChange to use Samba 3 in the future.

Guenther, Wilco and I made some initial progress on the policy library, allowing client-side manipulation of (group) policies in Samba. I worked with Simo on trying to get rid of an evil hack in Samba4’s event subsystem.

David Holder blogged about some of the IPv6 development that we did during the conference: http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=34

And lots of other things I can’t remember at the moment…

After the conference Andrew, Wilco and I drove back to the Netherlands and I played tour guide for a bit showing Andrew around the country during the afternoon and hacking Samba together in the morning. Later this week we took the train to Brussels, Eurostar to London and visited Sam’s company in the UK Midlands for a couple of days.

And in the midst of all this, it seems Ubuntu Hardy was released. Congratulations to all those involved!

Currently Playing: Brandi Carlile - Turpentine

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OpenChange Evolution plugin preview and Debian packages

meta = {'category': openchange, 'date': Mon 21 January 2008}

Srini writes that a preview of the Evolution OpenChange plugin has just been published. This plugin is now developed in the Evolution Subversion repository, but is based on the original plugin that was written by the Epitech team that was assigned to OpenChange earlier this year.

I’ve packaged new snapshots of Samba and OpenChange for Debian/Ubuntu. They’re available from my personal apt repository and will hopefully soon also be available from Debian experimental.

Update: The packages are now in Debian experimental as well as the upcoming Intrepid release of Ubuntu. I have removed them from my personal repository because I was running out of disk quota.

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Samba’s tdbdump reimplemented in Python

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Thu 10 January 2008}

Less than 150 characters in Python, while the original implementation in C requires more than 2000 characters

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import tdb, sys

db = tdb.Tdb(sys.argv[1])
for (k, v) in db.iteritems():
    print "{\nkey(%d) = %r\ndata(%d) = %r\n}\n" % (len(k), k, len(v), v)
}

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GTK+ LDB Browser

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sun 16 December 2007}

As some may have noticed, a large portion of my Samba 4 work during the last few months has been focussed on adding Python bindings for our various public libraries and the refactoring necessary to make it possible to add Python bindings. So far, we have bindings for LDB and TDB but I intend to add bindings for most of our public API so it is possible to, for example, open Windows registry files, join domains, etc. from Python.

LDB is our LDAP-like embedded database, and is for LDAP what sqlite is for SQL. Last night I decided to see how hard it would be to write a graphical browser for LDB using Python, and it turned out to be quite easy, thanks to PyGTK. There is a screenshot of what it looks like here. Packages with the Python bindings for LDB are already in Debian.

The sources for gtkldb are available in the samba-gtk bzr branch at http://people.samba.org/bzr/jelmer/samba-gtk/trunk, along with some of the GTK+ frontends for Samba 4 I wrote earlier (gregedit, gwcrontab, gwsvcctl, gepdump and gwsam).

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Epitech/OpenChange meeting

meta = {'category': openchange, 'date': Mon 12 November 2007}

I’ve had a lot of time to practice my French skills this weekend while visiting Epitech and meeting up with Julien, Ali, Dan and the other OpenChange folks in Paris.

There was a forum at Epitech where student teams present the projects that they’ve been working on over the course of the last year. One of the Epitech student teams has done an excellent job on an OpenChange plugin for Evolution that now even appears to have been picked up by upstream. The other projects were also quite interesting as well and varied from a fun to play 3D racing game to a much improved LGPL’ed implementation of the ClamAv virus scanner or a personal logging application for diabetics. Afterwards there was a little bit of an Open Source conference, where Dan and I gave talks about Open Source and Samba, respectively.

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SerNet asks Microsoft for specs

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sun 07 October 2007}

Now that the European court has decided SerNet has asked Microsoft to publish specifications on SMB/CIFS.

Martijn has posted some photos of the concert we went to a couple of days ago.

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Podcast with the Samba team

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Tue 02 October 2007}

Last week was the annual Samba get-together in the US. Jeremy and Leslie from Google organized a somewhat more informal event than the SNIA CIFS interop lab that we usually attend.

Several Samba team members, including myself, took part in a podcast about our involvement in the Summer of Code afterwards.

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OpenChange Interview

meta = {'category': openchange, 'date': Mon 04 June 2007}

Linux Weekly News had a good interview with Julien Kerihuel, lead developer of OpenChange, two weeks ago. It’s now also available for those who are not subscribed.

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Using a pqm with Subversion

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Fri 25 May 2007}

One of the things that I’ve always missed in DVCS is the ability to refuse commits in a branch that’s shared by multiple people based on a test suite run. Sure, it’s possible to have a pre-commit hook - but that would mean that you’d have to wait for the full test suite to run until the commit finishes. With the time it takes to run the Samba testsuite, this is not really an option.

One of the things that would work is to have everybody work in a separate branch and then have some sort of tool that merges those revisions from everybody’s personal branches that worked ok. However, to my knowledge, there is no such tool for Subversion.

Bazaar uses a tool called PQM (Patch Queue Manager). PQM usually controls the main branch (for example for Bazaar, it controls bzr.dev), and waits for GPG-signed requests to merge a specific revision into that main branch. Before accepting such a revision, it will try to run the testsuite to make sure it passes. This guarantees that the main branch never contains broken code (as far as can be indicated by the testsuite).

Now that bzr-svn supports true push, it is possible to actually use a PQM with a Subversion branch. I’ve tried it on a smaller branch last week, and am now looking into using this for my Samba work.

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SambaXP: a year with leaps of progress

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 30 April 2007}

Like most of the Samba team, I attended SambaXP in Goettingen again last week. This year we were able to announce a couple of big leaps forward:

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