Open Source > StorageEssentials

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, the man behind the Samba file server and self-confessed TSP packet molester talks with Dahna McConnachie about Samba and some of his other favourite pastimes. Tridge will be speaking more about clustered Samba at the upcoming linux.conf.au.

Expensive and error-prone digital tapes has forced BBC UK, one of the world's largest television broadcasters, to look at using computers running Linux to help produce its programs.

The cat and mouse relationship between Microsoft and the open source Samba continues as the team prepares another update to add support for Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.

Chris Mason has recently released Btrfs v0.10, which contains a number of interesting new features. In general, Btrfs has come a long way since LWN first wrote about it last June. Btrfs may, in some years, be the filesystem most of us are using - at least, for those of us who will still be using rotating storage then. So it bears watching.

Linux's ext4 filesystem, the successor to ext3, may well be the filesystem many of us are using a few years from now. Things have been relatively quiet on that front - at least, outside of the relevant mailing lists - but the ext4 developers have not been idle. Some of their work has now come to the surface with Ted Ts'o's posting of the ext4 merge plans for 2.6.25.

On June 23, HP announced that it was releasing the source for the "Tru64 Advanced Filesystem" (or AdvFS) under version 2 of the GPL. This is, clearly, a large release of code from HP. What is a bit less clear is what the value of this release will be for Linux. In the end, that value is likely to be significant, but it will be probably realized in relatively indirect and difficult-to-measure ways.