On Tuesday 15 July 2003 12:02, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: > I suppose -- people /still/ use Windows? Amazing ;)
I'm sure Buchan will explain why samba is going to be necessary for Windows to finally die--but even after that happens, samba may well survive. SMB/CIFS, when done right, is a good filesharing system. The only real problem with it is that all of Microsoft's implementations so far stink--but samba 3 does not stink. Samba is not only useful for transitioning LANs from Windows to linux, it's also useful for all kinds of multi-platform LANs. I can't think of another filesharing system that runs on so many *nix platforms that doesn't block in the kernel on network reads, handles user-level shares easily (with nice GUIs, even), allows hierarchical networks, can use LDAP or various other techniques for authentication, etc. And that works on every version of Windows, and Mac OS X, and (with cheap add-on software) MacOS 9.
