SMB (or CIFS, to which it is has been renamed by Microsoft) is a file-sharing protocol that has been used since the mid-eighties. It is supported by a large number of operating systems (of which Microsoft Windows is of course best known) and has been run over various protocols, such as NetBIOS, TCP/IP, IPX and NetBEUI.

Samba is a GPL'ed implementation of a SMB server and client. It has allowed companies to move away from Windows servers to Unix servers without modifying their Windows workstations.

Over the years, SMB has been extended to support the transport of RPC calls, printing and extended filesharing capabilities. The protocol has become ugly and the implementations buggy.

Microsoft is slowly moving away from SMB. Active Directory still contains SMB and even some new RPCs calls made over SMB, but it also contains a fair bit of (C)LDAP, Kerberos, DNS and DHCP (with proprietary extensions, of course). Longhorn will introduce 'WinFS', which most likely will replace SMB altogether and might make Samba obsolete.

This presentation will cover what efforts have been, will be, and can be made to implement the latest protocols used by Microsoft so that Unix and Windows can keep communicating.

Jelmer Vernooij is a member of the global Samba Team, a loose-knit group of about 30 people who contribute regularly to Samba. Together with John H. Terpstra, he is author of the ``The official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide'', published by Prentice Hall.

He has been using open source since around 1997 and has contributed to various open source projects, such as LTSP and Balsa.

During the daytime, Jelmer is studying for his bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Twente.