There’s a Samba alternative that adds security to your 3000 A pair of client-server experts are helping fill a two-year gap between the resource sharing tool Samba that you’ll get in MPE/iX 6.0 and a version with better security capabilities. Joe Geiser of CSI Business Solutions LLC and Michael Gueterman of Easy Does It Technologies have formed a joint venture to support and ship Samba/iX version 1.18p10. “MPE/iX 6.0 will contain Samba version 1.16p9, which is two-and-a-half to three years old, according to the [HP] Samba Team,” Geiser reports. It’s not that the Samba in 6.0 doesn’t work — it does, having been through almost two years of testing. But Lars Appel, the HP Germany Response Center engineer who started the port of Samba to the 3000, said the Samba in 6.0 won’t take advantage of third party security software on the 3000. “Samba/iX does not currently have any awareness of Vesoft’s Security/3000 or Monterrey Software Group’s SAFE/3000,” Appel said. “As I have no access to either product I cannot say if it will skip the “job/session name passwords” and only check for user and/or account passwords (potentially empty) — or if it will simply fail to validate the user.acct versus userpw,acctpw. In the latter case it will be next to unusable (except for guest shares, similar to anonymous FTP logons) whereas in the former case you definitely would not want to install/setup the Samba/iX stuff on your machine!” Look for more details at the Samba site hosted by Geiser and Gueterman, www.sambaix.com. HP is talking to the pair about providing support for the later, more secure version of Samba, once the code has been field-tested awhile. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved