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-Contributor: Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team
-Date: June 27, 1997
-Satus: Always out of date! (Would not be the same without it!)
-
-Subject: A bit of history and a bit of fun
-============================================================================
-
-This is a short history of this project. It's not supposed to be
-comprehensive, just enough so that new users can get a feel for where
-this project has come from and maybe where it's going to.
-
-The whole thing really started in December 1991. I was (and still am)
-a PhD student in the Computer Sciences Laboratory at the Australian
-National University, in Canberra, Australia. We had just got a
-beta copy of eXcursion from Digital, and I was testing it on my PC. At
-this stage I was a MS-DOS user, dabbling in windows.
-
-eXcursion ran (at the time) only with Dec's `Pathworks' network for
-DOS. I had up till then been using PC-NFS to connect to our local sun
-workstations, and was reasonably happy with it. In order to run
-pathworks I had to stop using PC-NFS and try using pathworks to mount
-disk space. Unfortunately pathworks was only available for digital
-workstations running VMS or Ultrix so I couldn't mount from the suns
-anymore.
-
-I had access to a a decstation 3100 running Ultrix that I used to
-administer, and I got the crazy notion that the protocol that
-pathworks used to talk to ultrix couldn't be that hard, and maybe I
-could work it out. I had never written a network program before, and
-certainly didn't know what a socket was.
-
-In a few days, after looking at some example code for sockets, I
-discovered it was pretty easy to write a program to "spy" on the file
-sharing protocol. I wrote and installed this program (the sockspy.c
-program supplied with this package) and captured everything that the
-pathworks client said to the pathworks server.
-
-I then tried writing short C programs (using Turbo C under DOS) to do
-simple file operations on the network drive (open, read, cd etc) and
-looked at the packets that the server and client exchanged. From this
-I worked out what some of the bytes in the packets meant, and started
-to write my own program to do the same thing on a sun.
-
-After a day or so more I had my first successes and actually managed
-to get a connection and to read a file. From there it was all
-downhill, and a week later I was happily (if a little unreliably)
-mounting disk space from a sun to my PC running pathworks. The server
-code had a lot of `magic' values in it, which seemed to be always
-present with the ultrix server. It was not till 2 years later that I
-found out what all these values meant.
-
-Anyway, I thought other people might be interested in what I had done,
-so I asked a few people at uni, and noone seemed much interested. I
-also spoke to a person at Digital in Canberra (the person who had
-organised a beta test of eXcursion) and asked if I could distribute
-what I'd done, or was it illegal. It was then that I first heard the
-word "netbios" when he told me that he thought it was all covered by a
-spec of some sort (the netbios spec) and thus what I'd done was not
-only legal, but silly.
-
-I found the netbios spec after asking around a bit (the RFC1001 and
-RFC1002 specs) and found they looked nothing like what I'd written, so
-I thought maybe the Digital person was mistaken. I didn't realise RFCs
-referred to the name negotiation and packet encapsulation over TCP/IP,
-and what I'd written was really a SMB implementation.
-
-Anyway, he encouraged me to release it so I put out "Server 0.1" in
-January 1992. I got quite a good response from people wanting to use
-pathworks with non-digital unix workstations, and I soon fixed a few
-bugs, and released "Server 0.5" closely followed by "Server 1.0". All
-three releases came out within about a month of each other.
-
-At this point I got an X Terminal on my desk, and I no longer needed eXcursion
-and I prompty forgot about the whole project, apart from a few people
-who e-mailed me occasionally about it.
-
-Nearly two years then passed with just occasional e-mails asking about
-new versions and bugs. I even added a note to the ftp site asking for
-a volunteer to take over the code as I no longer used it. No one
-volunteered.
-
-During this time I did hear from a couple of people who said it should
-be possible to use my code with Lanmanager, but I never got any
-definite confirmation.
-
-One e-mail I got about the code did, however, make an impression. It
-was from Dan Shearer at the university of South Australia, and he said
-this:
-
-
- I heard a hint about a free Pathworks server for Unix in the
- Net channel of the Linux list. After quite a bit of chasing
- (and lots of interested followups from other Linux people) I
- got hold of a release news article from you, posted in Jan 92,
- from someone in the UK.
-
- Can you tell me what the latest status is? I think you might
- suddenly find a whole lot of interested hackers in the Linux
- world at least, which is a place where things tend to happen
- fast (and even some reliable code gets written, BION!)
-
-I asked him what Linux was, and he told me it was a free Unix for PCs.
-This was in November 1992 and a few months later I was a Linux
-convert! I still didn't need a pathworks server though, so I didn't do
-the port, but I think Dan did.
-
-At about this time I got an e-mail from Digital, from a person working
-on the Alpha software distribution. He asked if I would mind if they
-included my server with the "contributed" cd-rom. This was a bit of a
-shock to me as I never expected Dec to ask me if they could use my
-code! I wrote back saying it was OK, but never heard from him again. I
-don't know if it went on the cd-rom.
-
-Anyway, the next big event was in December 1993, when Dan again sent
-me an e-mail saying my server had "raised its ugly head" on
-comp.protocols.tcpip.ibmpc. I had a quick look on the group, and was
-surprised to see that there were people interested in this thing.
-
-At this time a person from our computer center offered me a couple of
-cheap ethernet cards (3c505s for $15 each) and coincidentially someone
-announced on one of the Linux channels that he had written a 3c505
-driver for Linux. I bought the cards, hacked the driver a little and
-setup a home network between my wifes PC and my Linux box. I then
-needed some way to connect the two, and I didn't own PC-NFS at home,
-so I thought maybe my server could be useful. On the newsgroup among
-the discussions of my server someone had mentioned that there was a
-free client that might work with my server that Microsoft had put up
-for ftp. I downloaded it and found to my surprise that it worked first
-time with my `pathworks' server!
-
-Well, I then did a bit of hacking, asked around a bit and found (I
-think from Dan) that the spec I needed was for the "SMB" protocol, and
-that it was available via ftp. I grabbed it and started removing all
-those ugly constants from the code, now that all was explained.
-
-On December 1st 1993 I announced the start of the "Netbios for Unix"
-project, seeding the mailing list with all the people who had e-mailed
-me over the years asking about the server.
-
-About 35 versions (and two months) later I wrote a short history of
-the project, which you have just read. There are now over a hundred
-people on the mailing list, and lots of people report that they use
-the code and like it. In a few days I will be announcing the release
-of version 1.6 to some of the more popular (and relevant) newsgroups.
-
-
-Andrew Tridgell
-6th February 1994
-
----------------------
-
-It is now May 1995 and there are about 1400 people on the mailing
-list. I got downloads from the main Samba ftp site from around 5000
-unique hosts in a two month period. There are several mirror
-sites as well. The current version number is 1.9.13.
-
----------------------
-
-
----------------------
-It's now March 1996 and version 1.9.16alpha1 has just been
-released. There have been lots of changes recently with master browser
-support and the ability to do domain logons etc. Samba has also been
-ported to OS/2, the amiga and NetWare. There are now 3000 people on
-the samba mailing list.
----------------------
-
-
----------------------
-It's now June 1997 and samba-1.9.17 is due out soon. My how time passes!
-Please refer to the WHATSNEW.txt for an update on new features. Just when
-you think you understand what is happening the ground rules change - this
-is a real world after all. Since the heady days of March 1996 there has
-been a concerted effort within the SMB protocol using community to document
-and standardize the protocols. The CIFS initiative has helped a long way
-towards creating a better understood and more interoperable environment.
-The Samba Team has grown in number and have been very active in the standards
-formation and documentation process.
-
-The net effect has been that we have had to do a lot of work to bring Samba
-into line with new features and capabilities in the SMB protocols.
-
-The past year has been a productive one with the following releases:
- 1.9.16, 1.9.16p2, 1.9.16p6, 1.9.16p9, 1.9.16p10, 1.9.16p11
-
-There are some who believe that 1.9.15p8 was the best release and others
-who would not want to be without the latest. Whatever your perception we
-hope that 1.9.17 will close the gap and convince you all that the long
-wait and the rolling changes really were worth it. Here is functionality
-and a level of code maturity that ..., well - you can be the judge!
-
-Happy SMB networking!
-Samba Team
-
-ps: The bugs are ours, so please report any you find.
----------------------
-
----------------------
-It's now October 1998. We just got back from the 3rd CIFS conference
-in SanJose. The Samba Team was the biggest contingent there.
-
-Samba 2.0 should be shipping in the next few weeks with much better
-domain controller support, GUI configuration, a new user space SMB
-filesystem and lots of other neat stuff. I've also noticed that a
-search of job ads in DejaNews turned up 3900 that mention Samba. Looks
-like we've created a small industry.
-
-I've been asked again where the name Samba came from. I might as well
-put it down here for everyone to read. The code in Samba was first
-called just "server", it then got renamed "smbserver" when I
-discovered that the protocol is called SMB. Then in April 1994 I got
-an email from Syntax, the makers of "TotalNet advanced Server", a
-commercial SMB server. They told me that they had a trademark on the
-name SMBserver and I would have to change the name. I ran an egrep for
-words containing S, M, and B on /usr/dict/words and the name Samba
-looked like the best choice. Strangely enough when I repeat that now I
-notice that Samba isn't in /usr/dict/words on my system anymore!
----------------------