Google Hosts CIFS Workshop
By Jeremy
Allison, Open Source Team and Samba Core DeveloperAround
sixty developers from over twenty different companies converged on Google's Mountain View
Campus at the end of September to sample the free food. Oh yes, and also to test their
implementations of the
CIFS network
protocol for interoperability.
CIFS, the Common Internet File System
(that's Windows Networking to you and me), is the file sharing protocol build into all Windows
versions, and also MacOS X, Linux, HPUX and now Solaris clients.
Samba is the best known Free Software implementation
of CIFS, and most of the Samba Team were there to help improve Samba3 and Samba4's
interoperability along with the other CIFS vendors.
Over the three days
much code was written, much beer was drunk, and the air was turned blue with cursing when bugs
were found! As the Samba Team were mentoring several Google Summer of
Code
TM students, we also got to record a
podcast
about our experiences participating in the program over the past three years.
Thanks to Google for hosting the event and setting up the gigabit networking
required. The endless coffee supply was also essential when dealing with network protocol
problems.
The best summary of the success of our testing occurred on
the final day of the event, when a sad and frustrated CIFS client programmer wrote the
following on our testing notes whiteboard:
"the server *hates* me :-)
:-)"
It was great to see everyone coming together, even people from
competing companies, to help fix problems with everyone's implementations of CIFS. Look for
the resulting improvements in new versions of products and future releases of Samba.
The Samba Team takes a break during the CIFS Workshop.
(Photo Credit: Leslie
Hawthorn)
