Hi folks,
sorry for the lag in sending in the report for day three of the SambaXP conference, I've been busy traveling back and catching up with things at home.
The last day of SambaXP was split into two tracks again, one being "case study and vendor report", the other a developer track. I spent most of my time in the developer track, but you might want to check out http://www.sambaxp.org/ in a week or two to see the slides (and listen to the oggs) of some of the case study talks.
A notable talk in the morning was Stefan Metzmacher's talk on active directory replication. Most of the audience seemed to miss the significance of the talk, but personally I think this is one of the important milestones in Samba's history. It's much easier now to move from a Windows PDC to a Samba PDC, as Samba can just grab the active directory via the normal replication routines.
Later that day Lars Müller from the Samba team was talking about uniform Samba binaries as a way to get feedback about fixed bugs without the user having to know about compiling the sources. That might be an interesting idea to keep an eye on, Wine might want something similar once we go 1.0, and I figure that Samba will have something like that set up in 6-18 months.
The most interesting talk on Wednesday was given by Julien Kerihuel from OpenChange. The OpenChange people are building an open source replacement for Exchange. In order to properly support this, they are working on decoding the MAPI protocl, and they also provide a libmapi library for client applications. As a proof of concept, they have an evolution plugin that'll allow evolution to talk to exchange using MAPI. The talk had a couple of demonstrations of the functionality that were greeted with applause from the audience. While OpenChange still has a bumpy road ahead, I'm pretty sure they will manage. OpenChange is the Samba of groupware, definetely a project to watch.
The most exiting talk of the day, at least in my personal biased opinion, was in the case study track. But my perspective on that might be a little off, as that was the talk I was giving. I think it was recieved well by the audience. It probably won't be too interesting for you folks as you already know what Wine is all about. ;)
The last talk I attended on that day was given by David Holder, who works for Erion, a company that does IPv6 consulting. He had analyzed the Samba source code to check how much work it would be to make Samba IPv6-ready. cifs and Samba4 are almost there, Samba3 needs some work. This is mostly due to the fact that NBT doesn't do IPv6 by design and some of the Samba3 code still is coupled to this.
This is the last installment of this year's SambaXP report. More about Samba from a Wine perspective will certainly follow.
Kai