Joshua Tree National Park. Full of wonders.

"Mutter und Kind" @ San Diego Zoo

Well last weeks have been pretty busy. With a 10 hours flight, we arrived at San Francisco to get to San Diego to visit the Teradata Partners conference, an excellent event that included good discussions and lots of acceptance and recognition for SUSE Linux. I liked the way talks have been organized, or to say it in other words it was a matter of downloading an Android app to always have the overview. We served the SUSE booth at the conference, got involved into lots of discussions about the OS, and I was even happier in the moments when people asked questions on openSUSE – this is showing clearly that the project is well known! To leave some words on San Diego is very simple: Gaslamp Quarter, I’ll be back, and have a few more beers at Rock Bottom!

We then drove from San Diego to Salt Lake City by car. Having some days of vacation in between, this was the best choice. During our travel we stopped by and visited San Diego Zoo, the Joshua Tree national park, Zion national park, and Bryce Canyon.

In Salt Lake, Novell’s Brainshare conference was about to start. And guess what I’ve had the chance to present SMB Traffic Analyzer at this amazing conference! I’ve had the presentation two times actually, presenting the very latest development snapshot of SMBTA and while it was not visited by so many people, the ones who listened have been very tough and showed great interest, giving me the chance to make new contacts, and lots of discussion about Samba and SMB Traffic Analyzer, and openSUSE. So to bring this to an end: Brainshare was exciting!

SMB Traffic Analyzer is developing healthy. I was presenting Benjamin Brunner’s work on the real-time search function, user management, and the very latest statistic functions in webSMBTA. We haven’t had a release in the last months, which is unusual for SMBTA. That is actually caused by features we want to implement for the release. These features, such as SVG graphics for usage diagrams are not yet done,and I am working on it.

You guess it, we finally got a slot for a presentation at the wonderful openSUSE conference for SMBTA. To me, it is remarkable to see a project like SMBTA being presented at OSC because it is not really something related to openSUSE. It’s not that SMBTA improves your boot time, or discusses details of the buildservice, or makes your life with the openSUSE distribution better in any way. SMBTA is very likely not even interesting to the casual user, except for some administrators.

That said, SMBTA was born inside of the openSUSE infrastructure, growing to a project used on different distributions and operating systems, such as Solaris. And the one thing we can really say is that we exploited all the services that make up openSUSE to the core. We used the openSUSE Buildservice from the beginning, and we use appliances created by SUSE Studio for both demoing and developing SMBTA.

With the recent release of Samba 3.6.0, among it’s top changes like full SMB2 support and other major features, it is also prime time for SMBTA. The Virtual File System layer module that supports our current infrastructure is included in this release of the Samba CIFS server and that marks a milestone for our project. SMBTA is already used in production at some sites, and the release of Samba 3.6.0 will hopefully forward this trend.

Benjamin Brunner and me will give an introduction talk to SMB Traffic Analyzer at the openSUSE conference and most likely live-demo the software chain. We’ll welcome anyone interested to join our presentation at OSC!

Such as Benjamin Brunner of the development team has taken the search function to a new level by creating a simple way to fuzzy search your full Samba network:

webSMBTA now has a small input field that triggers a search function as you type...

... the search function will immediately be displayed and updated as you type, runs over anything SMBTA has seen, identifies what objects it has found, and makes those clickable....

... and a click on an object triggers webSMBTA to mark the chosen object in it's selector for the user to further examine the object!

Other stuff we are working on for SMBTA 1.2.6 are about making it easier for the administrator to inspect and check the SMBTA setup. Among these, SMBTA 1.2.6 will be able to tell which VFS modules have connected, which protocol version was used by them, and where they did come from. Should it be required, for example for bugreports, the smbtad configuration can be retrieved in an easy way through smbtatools. SMBTA 1.2.6 components will self check for version updates and can tell the administrator what needs to be done in case of configuration errors.

A browser showing webSMBTA, connected to a SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 virtual machine.

Ever wanted to just try SMB Traffic Analyzer to see what it can do for you, but have been hindered by the hassle of setup and configuration? Today the SMBTA team released SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4, a complete self containing appliance to be run by your virtualization software, such as vmware or VirtualBox.

It has never been easier to give SMBTA a try.

An instance of the smbtamonitor real time program running against SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 in VirtualBox.

Just download the OVF image we provide via SUSE Gallery, setup your virtual machine to have network access, and point your web browser to the hostname or IP adress of your virtual machine. Also, you can run all real time clients such as the smbtamonitor program, or our interface to rrdtool, rrddriver, against SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4. It has an open port for real time clients on port number 3491.

At the very first connect to webSMBTA, a configuration dialog will appear, asking the user to which database the connection has to be made. To run with SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4, just fill out the form exactly like given in the screenshot.

At the very first connection to webSMBTA, use these parameters to connect to the database in SMBTA Stresstest.

SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 comes with a preinstalled Samba server, is configured to host three shares on that server, and generates constant data traffic by six users that are running smbtatorture instances, a program we developed to test SMBTA. Thanks to the hard work of Benjamin Brunner on this release, the webSMBTA component is running out of the box in this release, hosted by an Apache webserver.

This release is based on our latest and greatest stable release of SMB Traffic Analyzer, version 1.2.5, and the rest of the software stack based on openSUSE 11.4. Needless to say: This release of SMBTA Stresstest was created with the fabulous SUSE Studio!

You can download the SMBTA Stresstest appliance from SUSE Studio, more information on the SMB Traffic Analyzer project is available here.

The team is proud to release SMB Traffic Analyzer version 1.2.5. Among numerous changes and enhancements, this release brings a huge documentation update on webSMBTA, thanks to Benjamin of the SMBTA team. In smbtaquery, we had a bug that caused the “from..to” and “since” time modifiers on functions not to work (bso#8169). Furthermore, this release fixes an error condition on smbtad which we encountered during the SambaXP conference, when a directory was created that already existed. Packages for Gentoo Linux and openSUSE should be available very soon, and with release 1.2.5, we’ve sub-packaged webSMBTA. The “one click install” option  for openSUSE will install all required repositories such as rails3 to run webSMBTA from the apache webserver. We have added installation instructions to the source tarball.

SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.5 makes changes to the database being used by SMBTA. We provide an upgrade path from whichever version of SMBTA you are coming from. Just run “smbtaquery -C” and follow the instructions.

Checkout the SMB Traffic Analyzer homepage to get more information and download options.

The development team is proud to announce the release of version 1.2.4 of SMB Traffic Analyzer. With a much longer development cycle than usual, we took the time to do real ground work on SMBTA, and reworked the whole database handling. As a result, SMBTA will from now on access it’s databases via libDBI, a generic database layer. Via libDBI, SMBTA is potientially able to run with sqlite, MySQL, and postgresql as database backend. Since both, smbtad and smbtatools have been rewritten to use the libDBI layer, smbtaquery can know run completely independent from smbtad, as it uses libDBI directly to access the database (bso#8065). We have tried hard to crash smbtad in test suites since we made the move to libDBI, and moved several tens of terabyte over samba shares without getting smbtad to fall (we are currently using postgresql as database). We strongly believe, since smbtad does not have to function as a network gateway to the database for the clients any more, the move to libDBI will make SMB Traffic Analyzer much more stable. SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.4 provides an upgrade path if the user wants to use the sqlite database that has been created with SMBTA version <= 1.2.3.

Furthermore, SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.4 debuts Benjamin Brunner’s  work on webSMBTA, a web interface to all functions of the smbtaquery program. It is a modern, rails3 based, intuitive interface, that reduces object selection to a few mouse clicks,

The object selector of webSMBTA

and makes running statistic functions on the objects a breeze. webSMBTA automatically retrieves all the objects known in your Samba network, and displays them in a way that gives an idea of the network structure. Out of these lists, you click the object you want to run a function on, and get a descriptive dialog for the function’s options. The output of functions is HTML rendered, and attached to the webSMBTA main page. Our ground work on XML in smbtaquery finally pays off, as webSMBTA is consuming HTML output of smbtaquery directly. Once a function has been chosen, it can easily be re-run by clicking it’s reload button, or removed from the page.

We have added a new chapter for the documentation on webSMBTA, as well as to the libDBI change.

All of smbtatools can now use a single configuration file, serving all of them (bso#8097). The “top” function of smbtaquery can now operate descending as well as ascending. (bso#8095).

You can download SMB Traffic Analyzer from the download page. Please be aware that currently binary packages of smbtatools 1.2.4 do not contain the code for webSMBTA, as webSMBTA is in Beta, has not yet been employed with Apache, and is not ready for being packaged. Of course, the 1.2.4 source tarball of smbtatools does contain the webSMBTA sources. Nevertheless, you can find a README file in the smbtatools tarball, describing how to run the webinterface by using the internal rails webserver. For more information on SMB Traffic Analyzer, check it’s homepage.

Today, we are moving the full release- and bug tracking from bugzilla.novell.com to bugzilla.samba.org.

Thanks to the bugzilla maintainers at the Samba Team, SMBTA gained excellent support in the Samba Bugzilla infrastructure:

• Product
  • SMBTA
    • Components
      • vfs_smb_traffic_analyzer
      • smbtamonitor
      • smbtaquery
      • rrddriver
      • smbtatorture
      • smbtad

The team is happy to announce the release of SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.3. It is loaded with new features and lots of bug fixes, driving SMBTA forward in terms of scalability, performance, and functionality. Let’s dive into and begin with the most important news on smbtad, the daemon program collecting data. A problem identified by several users was the fact that the created database grows too large after a short time. Well, at this level smbtad was doing real data mining and stores any single VFS function in it’s database. A copy of a single file that is larger than a megabyte could create more than a hundred entries in the database. smbtad now solves this issue with a reworked cache subsystem that is implemented as a bi-tree algorithm adding up similar VFS entries for up to 5 seconds, and thus creating an interpolation of the data to be stored. The result is a much smaller database and should make smbtad much faster. The user can change the time period while smbtad is summing up similar entries, and also force smbtad to do full data mining if wanted. (bnc#669679).

If your main target for using SMB Traffic Analyzer is to generate graphics with rrddriver or to run smbtamonitor, there are good news. The database handling in smbtad can be completely shut down. In this mode, smbtad only acts as a repeater, sending the data to the real-time clients, without the overhead of maintaining the database. The client programs have been adapted for this (bnc#668193).We have implemented a way to parse data from the VFS module without re-allocating the data in the systems memory. This makes smbtad much faster, reduces memory handling a lot, and much of the underlying code has been simplified (bnc#671346). The real time monitor code had problems when several smbtamonitor instances where connected, and the throughput display did not work in 1.2.2. As a consequence, we reworked the monitor code, simplified the code a lot, and removed throughput calculation from smbtad, reimplementing it in the smbtamonitor client (bnc#669809).

Due to a bug in the CmakeFile of 1.2.2. both smbtad and smbtatools where unable to install anywhere else than /usr; the installation prefix can now be given with the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX variable (bnc#673767). The smbtatorturesrv program, distributing unique filenames and supporting smbtatorture when running networked and in parallel, sometimes crashed on 32bit architectures, fixed in bnc#667101.

This picture is showing the HTML output of a fuzzy search done on a SMBTA Stresstest appliance.

Two new functions have been added to smbtatools. First off, there’s now a fuzzy search function in smbtaquery, allowing to do searches over the whole data set and supports unix wildcards. If the given search pattern is found, the function is identifying the object (bnc#599145). Also, smbtaquery, now includes a throughput calculation function, to let the user quickly view the data throughput of an object over the last minutes, hours or even days (bnc#668190). As mentioned before, throughput display in smbtamonitor did not work in 1.2.2. smbtamonitor now does this on it’s own, no longer requesting this calculation work from smbtad, and the interface has been slighty reworked. And finally, it now has keyboard handling The “top” function of smbtaquery has been reworked to display more information on the entries in the produced list. With every user and share, the domain is listed, and with any file, the corresponding share and domain is shown additionally (bnc#668172).

The SMBTA documentation has of course been updated to reflect the current state and is already uploaded here. openSUSE’s Buildservice already consumed SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.3, and downloads are available. Furthermore, with version 1.2.3, SMB Traffic Analyzer debuts on Gentoo Linux, and shall be available in the Gentoo Software directory soon. Of course, SMB Traffic Analyzer should appear in openSUSE Tumbleweed very soon.

The german ADMIN magazine released an extensive article about SMB Traffic Analyzer

In other news, SMB Traffic Analyzer recently got print media attention with a six page long, workshop-like article about it in the German ADMIN Magazine. The article is very detailed and really good in showing what SMB Traffic Analyzer can do and how to configure it, and even describes the SMBTA Stresstest appliance! Good stuff, the SMBTA Development team is happy about this work and suggests to buy the magazine if you read German and are interested in SMB Traffic Analyzer. Moreover, we added a new page “Develop/Contact/Contribute” to the homepage, to make it easier for people to get into SMB Traffic Analyzer development, or for users to talk about SMBTA. A new release of the SMBTA Stresstest appliance is ahead, including SMBTA 1.2.3, making it easy to give it a quick test. Stay tuned.