[HN Gopher] How Samba Was Written (2003)
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How Samba Was Written (2003)
Author : tosh
Score : 170 points
Date : 2026-01-04 09:58 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (download.samba.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (download.samba.org)
| i386 wrote:
| At the WiseTech office in 2006 we had a small shrine in the
| corner dedicated to Tridge, the patron saint of hackers.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > _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.
| Z_Z wrote:
| better off moving to Quebec. enables a more passive approach
| skrebbel wrote:
| how so?
| Z_Z wrote:
| only meant it in tongue-in-cheek jest. the "gros mots" in
| Quebecois french are firmly rooted in the culture and
| liberally applied. though I guess the same could be said
| about any language's swear words now that I'm thinking it
| out loud
| skrebbel wrote:
| Hahh nice, appreciate the elaboration!
| ben1040 wrote:
| I've been watching the Quebecois version of _Taskmaster_
| with community-made subtitles and I love how the subtitle
| writers have included brief idiomatic explanations for
| the swearing that is constantly peppered into the
| dialogue.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Tabarnak de calice de ostie! Most of their swearing is just
| references to Catholic paraphernalia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| My wife is fond of swearing profusely in Quebecois and it
| amused me how detailed this wikipedia entry was when I
| looked it up. Apparently, it was used to the fullest
| extent by her father recently in response to a broken
| toilet.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| 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...
| jchw wrote:
| Yeah, Hacker News does that. I've heard you can simply edit the
| title after submitting to fix Hacker News' "fixes" but I've not
| submitted enough things to give it a try.
| dcminter wrote:
| This is correct (I've done it a few times). I think there's
| an edit window though and at 8 hours we're well outside that.
|
| The other option (e.g. when it's not your submission) is to
| email the mods, which I've just done, and they will fix it up
| if appropriate.
| p_l wrote:
| A lot of "fun" with those documents is that some of them quite
| probably were archeological digs on Microsoft side too.
|
| For example, the MAPI specs have references to valid parts of
| the protocols and data structures that are not used anywhere
| and which in fact crash MAPI libraries (so Outlook and Exchange
| just throw errors if you give them such data), sometimes giving
| a glimpse of how there might have been abandoned features that
| were never delivered.
|
| Like, surprisingly, HTML email support in Outlook[1] :D
|
| [1] MAPI Message struct, and thus Exchange and Outlook, crashes
| when encountering "HTML message" let's call it "submessage".
| Turns out the valid way to save a HTML message is by wrapping
| it in RTF and saving it as Rich Text submessage. Plain text is
| another submessage.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| nolok wrote:
| To be fair, I'm not sure if it's an interop/open source thing,
| and it's just the fact that windows was always based on the
| fact it can be disconnected and run on a local account, even
| though microsoft tries to hide it.
|
| Also one thing I have discovered with the whole work from home
| thing, is that users connected to their personnal cloud account
| on windows at home who then also connect their professionnal
| o365 account for work randomly end up with various weird
| issues.
|
| Their cloud account in the OS thing is just not well thought
| out.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Alternatively, it is very well thought out, but has different
| goals than you imagined. It is certainly a terrible user
| experience in many ways.
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| to be fair, things also break on windows if you use their
| online services
| nolok wrote:
| 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...
| Someone wrote:
| > It was one of the "first few major cases" in the EU against
| tech
|
| Against? I would call it pro tech, against the tech industry.
| nolok wrote:
| Eh I would agree, I meant that in the "to reign companies
| that had been left to their own devices for too long".
| commandersaki wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| IIRC Samba started out working on interop with DEC Pathworks,
| which was somewhat compatible SMB implementation (devil in the
| details, Pathworks predates SMB ossifying into what it became
| in NT4 when there was a lot of customization by vendors).
|
| This meant that early versions were compatible with Pathworks
| servers but not Windows ones (but Windows could be configured
| to work with Pathworks)
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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.)
| doodlesdev wrote:
| 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 cafe 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.
| lionkor wrote:
| I feel like using an LLM for this is not a good fit, because
| it's super difficult to verify whether the knowledge it found
| is true or made up. LLMs are much better at coming to a
| conclusion when a human wouldn't be sure at all, and that seems
| really important here.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| I guess the LLM doesn't need to verify whether what it found
| is true or made up, but rather just save the request and
| answer for later, so it can be reviewed by a developer and
| documented.
| yencabulator wrote:
| In this case, you verify whether the knowledge was made up by
| comparing the virtual waiter behaviour to the actual waiter.
| Having a strong test suite like that is actually the ideal
| scenario for agentic development.
|
| (It still incredibly hard to pull off for real, because of
| complex stateful protocols and edge cases around timing and
| transfer sizes. Samba did take 12 years to develop, so even
| with LLM help you'd probably still be looking at several
| years.)
| vessenes wrote:
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 2003 was a completely different era for technical detail. That
| kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.
|
| People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and
| leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project
| and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by
| studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less
| expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave
| .
|
| Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get
| lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You
| grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it.
|
| Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP,
| pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl.
|
| Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN
| parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured
| fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a
| struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The
| world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and
| not just a rehashed Android UI.
|
| Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered
| other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and
| over again blaming whoever.
|
| Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still
| waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those
| days.
|
| /me goes and scours sourceforge
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree with everything you said, apart from "That kind of
| detail normally only sat in corporations.". I do not agree
| with it, because it applied to many open source projects.
|
| And yeah, remember Eggdrop? :D
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I do, I never understood it then, I do now. Hybrid Ircd is
| what I used for my server. You were cool if you used
| Ratbox, and Unreal I never unstood why you needed +a and +q
|
| Documentation was never fun so I'll use my age as an alibi.
| I was just a script kiddie and recalling downloading MB's
| of scripts and uploading them on to polarhome [0] where
| some awesome swede was hosting shell access to different
| systems on his home DSL. Me kitted with my three-hour
| limited 56k and my fathers work 128K ISDN line.
|
| Oh well, nostalgia over back to work, writing IT
| architecture docs.
|
| [0] http://www.polarhome.com
| dogleash wrote:
| > Where did we go wrong
|
| Driving character out of the software world. Spotify couldn't
| whip the llama's ass even if it wanted to. And it doesn't
| want to. Spotify is a boring office worker that we're
| professionally cordial with only because they run the
| stockroom.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you looked at 'old' software companies that existed at
| 2000, they were boring companies like IBM. Really what most
| people don't want to admit is most of the software world
| grew up and got old.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of
| dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces
| of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for
| granted.
|
| I won't take it for granted now.
|
| As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good
| too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a
| bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I
| had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed
| with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not
| complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| rcxdude wrote:
| Another win for the HN title-munging rules.
| darkwater wrote:
| Are they using something like 's/^[Hh]ow (to )?//' ?
| rcxdude wrote:
| I think so. Sometimes a mod comes and fixes it up
| afterwards but it's kind of inconsistent.
| creata wrote:
| Submitters can also edit the title themselves after
| submitting.
| kgwgk wrote:
| From the creators of "I met your mother" and "Green was my
| valley".
| dang wrote:
| That's very good!
| curtisblaine wrote:
| At least we know it wasn't passed down orally.
| Minor49er wrote:
| ...by a French waiter
| zem wrote:
| it was indeed
| skrebbel wrote:
| Samba
| emmelaich wrote:
| _How_ Samba Was Written
| rob74 wrote:
| Yeah, that's the HN "anti-clickbait" feature that (amongst
| others) removes the "How" from titles like "How we managed to
| run Doom on a mechanical typewriter", but in this case it
| doesn't make sense at all...
| Archer6621 wrote:
| If anything, it made it more clickbait-y due to being an
| unusual title.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, it's imperfect that way.
| sph wrote:
| How does removing the word "how" make a title less of a
| clickbait?
|
| "I made 40,000 dollars in a week with one simple trick" is
| exactly as bad as "How I made 40,000 dollars in a week with
| one simple trick"
| gosub100 wrote:
| It removes repetition and imitation. To avoid a frontpage
| list full of "why I rewrote ___ in rust" , ,"how I use
| rust for filing my taxes", "how I switched from braille
| to rust"
| zahlman wrote:
| I sort of get it, but overall I still get the impression
| this particular filter is hurting more than it helps.
| jonstewart wrote:
| There should be luminaries to whom this does not apply, and
| tridge is certainly among that small pantheon.
| khy wrote:
| I would say in this case it makes it enigmatic.
| layer8 wrote:
| Samba was written ...instead of vibe-coded. ;)
| dang wrote:
| Rehowed. Thank you!
| vessenes wrote:
| @dang original title is "How Sambas Was Written", which makes
| more sense
| dang wrote:
| Rehowed. Thanks!
| sedatk wrote:
| The title is actually "How Samba was written".
| dang wrote:
| Rehowed. Thank you!
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2026-01-09 23:01 UTC)