Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 05:12:36 -0700
From: Jim Dennis <jimd@starshine.org>


 Incidentally, last night the BayLISA (Bay Area chapter of 
 the Large Installations System Administrators --- SIG of SAGE
 (Systems Administrator's Guild --- which is a part of 
 USENIX)*  had Jeremy Allison of Whistle Communications as
 their speaker.

	* ( the URL's for all of those are:

		http://www.baylisa.org
		http://www.usenix.org/sage
		http://www.usenix.org
		and http://www.whistle.org

	    Whistle make a turnkey Internet server
	    for SOHO's called InterJet.  It uses an
	    embedded copy of FreeBSD and some 
	    some packet filtering and NAT/masquerading
	    code and like all of that.  I've got a friend
	    (http://www.dis.org) who did the security 
	    design on it.  I hear it's a pretty good piece
	    of work; plug it in and voila, instant
	    dial-on demand Internet for the whole office).
	    

 Jeremy is one of the core members of the Samba team and he
 talked about the future of Samba.  The slides he presented
 should be available at http://www.baylisa.org/events/past/
 pretty soon (I hope).

 The interesting project is to allow Samba to function as a
 primary domain controller in an NT network.  This would 
 allow for a much more meaningful implementation of XSSO
 (single sign one) and for a real consolidation of directory
 services (currently you can't get your NIS and NT domains
 co-operating.

 A few other interesting tidbits:

	'Authentication and directory services are the holy
	grail.  Whoever controls that on the servers owns
	the whole enterprise.'

 (Talking about how MS will be using a loophole in the 
 Kerberos standard to create an implementation that is 
 completely compliant with the standard and completely
 non-interoperable between NT clients and Unix servers
 --- they'll require that the servers be NT boxes, and
 "won't care" what the clients are running).

 (I think our only hope is to create a defacto LDAP/Kerberos 
 (or SESAME-like GSS-API) implementation before NT 5.x 
 ships, and get all of the Unix vendors to sign onto it).

 ... another:

	'The greatest danger facing freeware today is
	software patents.  When the commercial software
	vendors realize that they can't compete with the
	open software model on technical merits, they'll
	patent everything they do and require licenses
	and NDA's for any interoperability.'

 (I don't have recordings of these so I'm forced to 
 paraphrase.  However, I've copied Jeremy on this 
 message so he can straighten out any attributions before
 this "goes to press").



--
Jim Dennis  (800) 938-4078		consulting@starshine.org
Proprietor, Starshine Technical Services:  http://www.starshine.org
        PGP  1024/2ABF03B1 Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org>
        Key fingerprint =  2524E3FEF0922A84  A27BDEDB38EBB95A