Just got back from Brisvegas, Queensland - headed up
there on Wednesday 6 Feb for linux.conf.au, which I found
most interesting. It was particularly refreshing to see some
progress with upcoming Samba releases -
specifically much better support for Windows 2000 and Microsoft
Active Directory
supports Kerberos, and Samba servers can be added to AD
domains fairly easily. winbind has also improved, allowing
PAM/NSS machines to use AD for user/group information -
which would be mostly useful for MS shops with the odd unix
box. I'm sure there's plenty of other goodies in Samba 3,
but this is the stuff I'm mostly interested in. The time
setting code was particularly cute. I find Single Sign On,
authentication, authorisation and security in general
thoroughly intriguing.
Had a good yarn to Andrew Tridgell about AD too,
specifically wrt modifying OpenLDAP to support
Active Directory. Sounds like there's a fair bit of work
involved but I'd love to see an open source implementation
so I'm planning to get stuck into this with David Elson as
soon as time permits. I would have liked to have seen the
chatter involved in adding a win2k workstation to a domain
but it insisted on talking to the DNS root servers (all of
them) and fell back onto legacy DCERPC calls. Adding NT ACL
support to OpenLDAP and making the Kerberos PACs work are
going to be interesting challenges, as is automatically
updating things like the USNs (sequence numbers).
There were plenty of other interesting talks, especially
rasmus's PHP talk, User Mode Linux, Debian Porting, oh, and
how could I forget Neil Brown's kNFSd Authentication talk
which was most interesting. It's also good to see increasing
interest in software engineering practices wrt constantly
changing APIs, bugs, etc. which is going to become
increasingly important as more companies start relying on
OSS.