Michael Dolan Dot Com

Archive for January, 2009

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

IBM reports record earnings

Wow, even I’m impressed. I like to think IBM’s long term strategic planning and insight helped the company prepare for this environment.

There’s a lot of bad economic news floating around, but there wasn’t much coming out of Armonk, New York, today as IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2008. Despite the Meltdown, IBM reached record revenue, pre-tax profit, cash flow, and earnings per share levels in 2008, thanks to a strong close in the final quarter of the year.

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Is Samba 4 going after the Windows Active Directory stronghold?

Admittedly I have neither read or heard much about Samba 4, but it sounds like they’re gunning for Active Directory replacement (finally). I’d be very interesting in seeing a comparison table of what features are supported (and in what DC roles) vs AD… if you know of such a comparison, please let me know. I checked samba.org and wikipedia but didn’t find anything. 

Looking at the article /. linked to, this may be a while off  with Bartlett saying, “we don’t know what people need”

From /.

“Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year’s linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft’s custom protocols. Because AD is ‘far more than LDAP and Kerberos,’ Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft’s customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager.”