The Samba Team welcomes new Samba Team member, James Peach. James has worked in the SGI's Australian engineering team for a number of years, prior to which he worked on automated network discovery at Avaya Labs. At SGI he has worked on numerous file serving and networking projects including POSIX compliance, naming and PAM, NFS and NAS server management and monitoring.

Nowadays he spends most of his time on Samba, splitting his time between helping SGI customers with Samba problems and making sure that Samba runs well on scalable InfiniteStorage NAS systems. His main Samba focus is on performance and scalability, integration of Samba within a storage software stack, and file server management.

The following is taken from a recent email interview with James:

• When did you first start to take in interest in hacking on Samba?

  There was some internal reorganisation and maintenance of the SGI Samba product was assigned to my group which is involved in various storage and fileserving projects.

  After some discussions with customers, we realised that there were areas where we needed better Samba integration with the SGI software suite and areas where we needed to provide some performance improvements. This led to me becoming the SGI Samba maintainer on a most-time basis (that's full-time minus all the other stuff I have to do).

• You've got a long history of feeding patches to Team members before joining the Team. What areas in Samba have you worked on in the past?

  I started with a set of trivial patches that were specific to the IRIX environment and toolchain and I tend to fix IRIX build breakages when they occasionally happen. I'd like to think that my crufty directory traversal patch prompted Jeremy to fix the long standing performance problems enumerating large directories. I do need to sit down and push some of my patch backlog into svn though.

• Now that you're a part of the Team, what will your work focus on?

  Probably much the same. Within SGI we are really interested in scalability, so I'll be continuing to look at scaling Samba on high cpu count Altix and Origin servers.

  I'd like to be able to do more to increase the observability of Samba, so I'm planning on putting out an updated PCP agent soon, but that's really the tip of the iceberg. I'd also like to do more work in creating stable interfaces that other projects can use to develop software on top of Samba.

• How has being a part of the Samba Team for for the last month changed your life? ;-)

  Not very much so far. I'm trying to be a bit more conscientious about following the mailing lists.

For others interested in following Samba development (or maybe in helping with Samba development), samba-technical@lists.samba.org and #samba-technical is the best place to catch James and the rest of the Samba Team.