IBM has deployed Samba as part of file storage solutions for many years now. The current product of IBM is called Spectrum Scale and it delivers clustered Samba to a world-wide base of Enterprise customers on top of IBM's clustered file system known as gpfs.

The first part of the talk is supposed to describe selected requirements, use cases and enhancements this mission has been driving over the last years. This could include topics like file contention, access control lists, and Mac support.

The second part of the talk will address the new challenging requirements with respect to identity mapping like the server side group resolution for NFS clients and the increasing demand to add sssd to the clustered Samba server nodes.

IBM Spectrum Scale is a software defined storage offering of a clustered file system bundled together with other services. Samba is included as part of the product to provide a clustered SMB file server and integration into Active Directory. This talk discusses from a development point of view the integration of Samba into a storage product and what the development team has learned over the years. Topics will include the requirement for automated testing on multiple levels and the collaboration with the upstream Samba project. Examples will be used to illustrate problems encountered over time and how they have been solved. Further topics will be challenges that have been solved and gaps that have been seen with the usage of Samba.

In recent times, container application platforms, in particular kubernetes, have become extremely popular, have for instance overtaken the virtual machine centric cloud operating system OpenStack in popularity. In contrast to virtual machine environments which run a variety of operating systems and therefore also have natural use cases for Samba, container platforms are usually running one operating system (kernel) only, and thus don’t offer a very obvious space for Samba, whose main purpose is to act as an agent between different operating systems. Is there still a stage for Samba in container land?

This presentation will start with an introduction to the storage concepts of kubernetes and the container storage interface standard CSI, which generalizes these to other container platforms. It will explain the roles of file, block, and object storage in kubernetes and then shows how a distributed software defined storage system like ceph or gluster is brought into kubernetes, running alongside the consuming applications and managed by so called “operators”, providing storage self service for the applications. Time permitting, the presentation may include a demo of what is possibly the easiest installation of a ceph cluster so far.

From here on, the presentation will explore some very interesting and possibly surprising opportunities for Samba in this environment. Details are omitted in this abstract in order to keep up the suspense.

• Using S4U2Self in winbindd
• The limitations of existing kerberos libraries
• The challenges of adding new features to kerberos libraries
• Kerberos testing with plain python

From the network down to the filesystem and back. This talk will give an overview on Samba's SMB2 packet processing with the goal of giving novice smbd hackers a starting point to the most important source code subsystems involved when a client sends a "create a file" request to the server.

This is a follow up to last years talk about managing AD via an ncurses gui. This talk will cover additional improvements to the ADUC and ADSI Edit modules, as well as covering a new DNS Manager. ADUC and ADSI Edit now communicate with AD via samba python bindings, and the DNS Manager interacts with samba-tool calls. The tools have also been wrapped in a redistributable AppImage, which can run on multiple distros. Automated testing has also been written.

Multi Factor Authentication is becoming more important in our infrastructure, with organisations starting to require it for sensitive accounts and more. So why does Multi Factor Authentication ... work? How does human behaviour influence our security and interact with threats that exist online? How can design and human interaction extend to making safer systems?

Come along and learn about human interaction and design, the psychology of how humans interact with systems. We'll extend this into security to understand why human error is really the fault of poor systems design. Finally we'll talk about different threats and how MFA works to protect us from them - at a psychological level.

Samba, particularly the AD part, is riddled with Python. The transition from Python 2 to Python 3 was painful. Now that is over and we have the sudden benefit from a decade of language and library development. Some of the changes are actually quite useful, including an improved debugging infrastructure and built-in asynchronous concepts.

Smbcmp is a cli tool for making diffs between two pcap files containing SMB packets and rendering them using curses. For the first part of the project we had to make better diffs by using the pdml output of Tshark and for the second part we added a GUI and ported smbcmp to Windows.

Slides (PDF)

The SMB3 kernel client has become the most active network/cluster file system on Linux over the past few years, and continues to add new features and optimizations at a rapid pace. These allow Linux to better access Samba server, as well as the Cloud (Azure), NAS appliances and Windows and Macs and an ever increasing number of embedded Linux devices.

Performance has dramatically improved, not just with the addition of GCM support, but also with continued improvements to compounding, and better parallelization, and also with the addition of multichannel support which allows Linux to spread I/O better across many network devices. New features continue to be added such as the ability to boot diskless systems from Samba, and even swap over SMB3 mounts. Sparse file support over SMB3 mounts is now much better. POSIX compatibility of the kernel client also has been improving with the SMB3 POSIX Extensions to the protocol and with improved testing (the "buildbot" automated testing framework has been invaluable and continues to improve quality). New security features like "modefromsid" allow Linux to better handle common scenarios over SMB3 mounts. In addition the new Linux Kernel server will enable even more use cases for SMB3 on Linux. This has been a very exciting year for SMB3 support in the Linux kernel!

This presentation will describe and demonstrate the progress that has been made over the past year in the Linux kernel SMB3 support in accessing Samba and also the Cloud (Azure) using Linux clients. In addition recommendations on common configuration choices, and troubleshooting techniques will be discussed. 

SmartNICs -- programmable network offload cards -- are now very much "a thing", with several vendors in or entering the market. Storage acceleration is one of the most common use-cases cited by proponents, but what that actually means is not entirely clear. This talk addresses some of the ways in which the performance of the SMB2/SMB3 stack can be improved by SmartNICs, and the design criteria that needs to be considered in order to make SMB Offload viable. We will also cover the following questions:

• Which SMB transports can be supported?
• What state information, if any, should be maintained by the offload engine?
• How can the engine be tested while it is being developed?
• How will the upper levels of the stack connect to the offload layer?
• Is this just a dream, or is there some skin in the game?

Slides (PDF)

Turkish Government decided to move open source technology around 2013. After this decision Profelis work on desktop server migration project and developed OpenSuse based distribution called Gibux.

37.000+ desktop migrated in 3 years. After this migration, Ministry approved AD servers migration to Samba4. Today 515 servers on countrywide using Samba as Authentication. This is one of the biggest open source migration projects in Turkey. 

Slides (PDF)

Recently spotlight got support for elasticsearch, what about the experimental WSP support?

1. Can it do the same?

2. What's involved

3. How does it affect the existing implementation.

Accessing files on Samba servers optimally from Linux clients is essential to a wide variety of workloads. Linux continues to evolve, with new file system features and syscalls being added every year. This presentation will provide an update on the status of the Linux/POSIX protocol extensions to the SMB3.1.1 protocol, what has been added to the specification, what the implementation status is for the Linux kernel client and for Samba server and client tools (like smbclient for example). We will show examples of what works today and why these extensions are so exciting and useful. Looking forward - we will also discuss any changes and suggestions for future versions to enable Linux to continue to improve its ability to access network storage.