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.

Wombat demo sites back up

It's aliiiiiiive! Thanks to Thomas Ingham, a fellow Wombat developer, http://wombat.worldforge.org/ has a new home, ending a couple of months of downtime while I was looking for new hosting. Tom's box has enough power to allow running two instances of Wombat. Following the next release, the Wombat demo site will be running the latest released version of Wombat, while the Wombat development site will be running the tip of the development tree, on an example media repository. We're currently dealing with the teething pains of rolling out Wombat on a distro that is different from the one I develop on, but everything should be running fine in a couple of days. Thanks again to Tom and his sysop Josh for giving two cute little Wombat web-apps a new home.

Guten Morgen net

After a couple of days of grinding through the code, the "net" tool from the Samba suite is finally ready to speak languages other than English. A bit over 1700 messages are now waiting for translators. Note to self: Next time I work on i18n, I want combat pay.

Huston, we have a login

After some initial issues, I have just joined my first XP box to Samba4 running on snoopy, my ARM-based system-on-a-chip home server. So now I have a spiffy Active Directory setup running on a system that makes no noise, barely heats up, and that peaks at 2W power usage. If that's not green IT, I don't know what is.

WOMBAT 0.4.5 released

The WOMBAT team is happy to announce the release of 0.4.5 WOMBAT 0.4.5 is mostly a bugfix release. Several backend and usability issues have been resolved. Features include

• Tag cloud now really is a "cloud", not just a list of tags
• In directory view, clicking on the expanded information no longer collapses the extended information (bug #291724)
• Tag-based browsing now filters on multiple tags if desired

As always, check out the WOMBAT live demo.