Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS=samba, smbclient, windows, 2003, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 32 - Dated: Thu May 25 10:49:48 EST 2006 From the desk of David Clark In our last issue I commented on our newsletter web database project and will mention it here again as we have now finalised and released version 1.1 to our customers. My thanks to those who provided the feedback to make it all possible. Please visit: http://www.davrom.com/newsletter to view a demo. Essentially it can be used as a simple e-mail database messaging interface so you aren't tied down to using it as a "newsletter" system if you don't want to. Support continues to be more web server/e-mail based of late and some fun with printers on SCO/Linux servers interfacing with Windows 2003 server via Samba - please read the article further in this newsletter. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote UNIX/Linux - where the game is the same and the goal posts don't move. Samba and Windows 2003 In the last few months I have come up against issues with Samba interfacing with Windows 2003 server so I thought I would raise some awareness with readers of the issues at hand. When they released 2003 they said they were doing away with a lot of the older SMB (Server Message Blocks) interfacing owing to problems with the older code (at least that is what one report says and let's not forget who designed that networking in the first place). What this means for those using Samba in a MS newtwork is you now need to update your Samba version to 3.x to even be able to communicate with 2003 - and there are more issues than I will cover here - but the goal posts have been moved again! We first struck an issue when we needed to run a smbclient (Samba Client) based script to backup a SCO server to a share folder on a 2003 box - the age of the OS along with the supported version of Samba meant we had to design a MS ftp script to run from the 2003 server to ftp the backup images over from the SCO server - this works well but I have always liked the extensive logging and checks you can run when UNIX/Linux are in the driver's seat. I have also struck this issue with RedHat server needing some extensive updates to talk to 2003 - and the printers still didn't work correctly. I will continue to dig into this area and make notes in future newsletters as to what the open-source community is doing to keep Samba interfacing with the many changings in MS. A quick google with show you what I mean. Old scripts never die Over the past 18 years or so I have written hundreds of Bourne shell scripts for customers and personal use and I recently dug one out of the dust for active use again. In 1993 I wrote two scripts which allowed me to place a text file in a directory and have one of the scripts come along and grab the file and send it as an e-mail at a later date in time. This facility was handy for updating customers and keeping me reminded of on-going issues and projects. As I am now using web interfacing into most tasks to run scripts in the background, mostly via PHP, I set about writing a web interface that would re-active this facility - and it worked first off. My point is: What an awesome and clever technology the shell environment is and how many software packages allow you to pull out some bit of code that is 13 year old, and utilise it "today" with little or no modification to the original code. As always, I encourage all UNIX/Linux users to get into the shell environment and get to know what you can do to make things easier in your day to day environment. In the news SCO is holding its "2006 City to City Tour" events in each major city here in Australia so please go to: http://au.sco.com/registration to find out the date/venue for your location. The one in Brisbane is on June the 6th so I hope to see you there. Fedora Core 5 has been in circulation for some months now and has a whole host of utilities for your server and desktop needs. http://www.redhat.com/fedora A version of Linux that is gaining more profile in magazines such as Linux Magazine is Ubuntu - check it out at: http://www.ubuntu.com Tech Tip festival on Linux: To proof read the newsletter I used to feed the text into Windows based voice synthesizers such as ReadPlease so that I can pick up on grammar and spelling more quickly than re-hashing through the text. What stunned me was I found a utility on Linux that has been there all along that does the same thing. The command is called "festival" and one of its features is that it can read text files back to you through your PC speakers. To read back text file I use the command: festival --tts textfile Back to Newsletters 
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