How Samba Was Written (2003)

The EU court case against Microsoft, with FSFE and the Samba team fighting the good fight, was also a major step in getting there.

It was one of the "first few major cases" in the EU against tech, and the testimonies from the open source side had been great in explaining to the judge just what they wanted (and almost as important, what they didn't want at all, despite Microsoft claiming otherwise)

Then Microsoft got a fine by day and tried to play the force card by refusing to pay for a while.

https://fsfe.org/activities/ms-vs-eu/ms-vs-eu.en.html

https://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2011/05/27/samba-case-hearing...

> Now one problem with the "French Cafe" technique is that you can only learn words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other words? Say for example you want to learn to swear in French? You would try ordering something at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe or poking him in the eye when he gives you your order. As you are being kicked out you take copious notes on the words he uses.

This is written so compellingly that I almost want to try this approach to learn French swearing.

This is nicely written, and the style is fresh after a year of reading LLM writing whenever I click.

Interesting to me is the audience - this article is appropriate for a middle schooler on up to read, and assumes no technical knowledge at all, or very little. Documentation targets and the social culture around them have varied since I started reading documents like these, but this sets an especially low bar for reader knowledge.

I like it. On the one hand, I could have gotten much more technical detail out of a version that used industry-specific words and was half the length, but on the other, I got what i needed, and learned much about the author to boot.

Nicely written.

If I ever want to teach someone how to write a black box implementation for some kind of software interface, I'll point them to this to get started. The French café analogy is pretty good. It's also great because Parisians aren't always the nicest people around, just like the servers and clients you'll be working with during your implementation.

I guess nowadays you could also automate some part of the protocol discovery with LLM agents? Has anyone tried this before with any promising results? My idea would be to have a traditional fuzzer poking at the server, but use an LLM agent whenever you get a non-error message or a different error message to attempt the well-crafted request without having to shotgun every possibility under the sun into the server.

Nadella' Microsoft talks a good game about open source, but Samba (for all it's awesomeness), arguably the key piece of interop between Windows and Linux, is still periodically awkward to deal with. For example, if Windows users authenticate with their cloud account (which MS made basically compulsory) things tend to break.

Note that the complete title is "How Samba was Written", but apparently there is a list of unapproved interrogative adverbs...

Also note that since the MS-EU settlement, the SMB protocol is quite extensively, if a bit passive-aggressive opaquely, described in a series of documents that Microsoft updates to this day, e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

At the WiseTech office in 2006 we had a small shrine in the corner dedicated to Tridge, the patron saint of hackers.

There was a weird moment when the overlay filesystem in docker had a disk leak for files that were written to inside the container and not being able to clean up after they exited except by resetting the entire host system.

One of the recommended ways to solve it was to smb mount a volume for the volatile files. Which almost as fast as the overlay.

I remember reading an interview or a biography of Tridgell that talks of him writing the code for what became Samba before Linux had existed, for I think interop between Microsoft and DEC.

Minor points of HN amusement:

This item is popping up from HN's Second-Chance Pool - check the mouse-over text on the submit time. Background - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

This item has been on HN a number of times. Sometimes the "How " is re-added to the title, sometimes not. (Click the 'samba.org' link, above, for a quick look at that.)

[stub for offtopicness]