At the Silicon Valley Linux Users’ Group (SVLUG), John Terpstra lectured on the development history and status of Samba, a high-performance storage project he worked on, and ClearOS.
John is a technology manager and co-author of The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide (Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series).
He has previously worked as a VP at TurboLinux and Caldera on Linux clustering products. (I vaguely remember those products from way back around 2000.)
Some of the Samba tips he gave were:
- trim your samba configuration file down to essential settings
- Samba’s ActiveDirectory capabilities enable large networks to scale beyond Microsoft’s implementation
- network bandwidth consumption can be reduced by proper configuration of WINS and broadcast vs. anycast
John also mentioned that Microsoft is contributing to Samba through their effort to make various protocols available to all POSIX operating systems and also interop testing meetings.
He gave an interesting overview of a document discovery project that required an elaborate storage system. He was able to setup a working test environment with RHEL, LVM, GFS2 and DRBD and various filesystems before switching to Glusterfs on top of Solaris ZFS for more efficient handling of directory metadata with deep directory paths containing 800,000 files per directory. (There were approx. 3 volumes containing 14 TB each.)
Thanks to Symantec for hosting the meeeting once again.
Axceleon acquires Turbolinux’s EnFuzion Clustering Solution (2002)
