On the way to Samba 4, week 47

Not much to show for this week. I spent the week at a conference, and while I learned many interesting things, I didn't have time to get Samba-related work done. Let's try again for week 48.

On the way to Samba 4, week 46

Really not much time to work on Samba this week. So I didn't get around to really debug the failing echo test for quite a while. Then tridge pointed out that I was trying to use a connected UDP socket as if it was not connected, and things started to work like a charm. It doesn't look like I'll have much more time during week 47. Hopefully I will get around to clean up the patches and push my example anyway.

On the way to Samba 4, week 45

A bit late, as usual, but I finally have something productive again. I've got a Samba4 UDP echo server and async client library (including torture test suite), and they're almost working. :) I'm saying almost because I can only get it to work manually right now, not from "make test". I'm sure it's some small thing I'm missing, I'm expecting this to be fixed soon. The code also still lacks some explanatory comments, but should be ready for the mainline for the week 46 report. The client library and torture test also runs against netcat, so two "implementations" of echo servers are supported for sure. ;)

On the way to Samba 4, week 44

I usually hate it when real life stops me from coding, but in this case I had a really fun weekend off the computer. The downside is that the echo server still is not done. So not much happening on the Samba 4 front from my side. One related news item though is the release of a new version of the Yocto Project. Quoting from their website:

The Yocto Project™ is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture.

Based on OpenEmbedded, one of it's supported platforms is the Beagle board. This looks like a pretty good platform to play with to get a bunch of embedded Samba images to work. This goes straight on my todo list, as if that wasn't pretty full already. Still, maybe a nice setup to demo at the next SambaXP conference. So, that's it with this week's installment of my Samba 4 blog post. Unless real life happens again, maybe next week I can show the world how a well-designed Samba 4 task looks like.

On the way to Samba 4, week 43

Last week, I didn't really get to spend much time on Samba 4. About the only thing I managed was working on a patch that renamed the s4 "net" binary to "samba-tool" while at the GSoC Mentor Summit 2010 with Jelmer. The rename reduces the number of executables with the same name in s3 and s4, getting us a step closer to a fully merged build. Renaming the s4 net tool hopefully inconveniences less admins out there. If you've been bitten by this, sorry about that. That's all there is for now for this week. With any luck, next week's post will be a bit longer.

On the way to Samba 4, week 42

This is the first installment of my hopefully regular progress reports on the things I did last week to get Samba 4 closer to a stable release. The biggest piece of work certainly was finally pushing the DNS server implementation. Yes, that's correct, Samba 4 now has it's own DNS server. So far, all it does is serve out resource records from AD that it's authoritative for. You need to sync over the LDAP entries from another AD DC as well. Still, that's a good start, and thanks to the existing infrastructure in Samba4, it was possible to do all of this in about 1000 lines of code. Features still missing from the DNS server so far:

• Recursive query support (needs a DNS resolver library, working on that)
• Support for update requests so clients can update their own entries
• On provisioning, we need to pre-load the database with a couple of DNS records

You can see a broad overview of the todo items for the DNS server in source4/dns_server/TODO.

WOMBAT 0.5.0 released

The Wombat team is happy to release Wombat 0.5.0

Compared to the 0.4.0 release, Wombat 0.5.0 sports a lot of new features.

Notable differences are:

• Now based on Pylons 0.9.7 and SQLAlchemy 0.5
• No support for Python 2.4 anymore due to Pylons requirements
• Users can now upload artwork
• Uploaded artwork will be committed to the media repository after moderation by an administrator or lead artist
• Tag-based browsing and other new UI features
• A new subversion backend uses pysvn instead of executing the svn shell commands
• Automated database cleanups

Changes since the 0.4.5 release include:

• Art upload features as mentioned above
• Security hardening
  • More resistance against command injection
  • More complicated password algorithm to slow down rainbow-table attacks
• Multiple bug fixes

As always, the Wombat demo site has the latest version for you to test.