Linux Format mag. article F14 vs ubuntu

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 00:10 -0500, Robert Myers wrote:
> I used to be a samba stud.  Once I saw that ubuntu would do it for me,
> I thought, "Why should I have to?"  I have a pretty complicated
> network.  One less application/server to configure is nice.
> 
> >> These are not typical clueless "desktop" users.  The same users
> might
> >> well be using CentOS or Fedora or RHEL on a huge cluster, but, when
> >> they do, there's a gearhead to take care of all the really cool
> stuff
> >> that Linux studs love to obsess over.
> >
> > Studs? Gearhead?
> 
> Guys who used to mess with their cars, can't do it any more because of
> the electronics, and take it out on obscure command line options in
> Linux.  They have "detail-oriented/OCD" confused with "smart."  Linux
> fairly crawls with these types.  Ubuntu understands that most of the
> world is not like that and doesn't want to be like that. 
----
when you automatically configure something like samba, a lot of
assumptions are made which may work for a majority of users but becomes
settings that MUST be changed for the minority of users in order for it
to work. Those are philosophical choices that each distribution is
obviously free to make for their users. Generally Fedora packagers will
distribute the settings as intended by upstream developers which will
match the documentation provided by the upstream developers.

I find that Ubuntu has an astounding number of documentation pages on
various wikis that are often out of date, do not track the upstream
packagers and sometimes add to the confusion of the users and while it
may work for some, it also fails and sometimes fails miserably for
others.

Samba itself is an extremely complicated package because it is so
versatile. It operates both as a server and as a client, emulates
methods/protocols from Windows 98 through Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista
and now Windows 7. It offers a variety of authentication systems whether
local, LDAP, an AD server etc. As a Samba team member, it seems foolish
for any distribution to put into place a customized smb.conf on each
install but again, each distribution is certainly free to do as they see
fit.

Craig


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