The Samba Team welcomes new member Derrell Lipman. In addition to his work with Samba, Derrell has several years of experience in software design with various start-up companies, including his own. He's currently involved with Backlot Technologies where he plays a critical role in development of the company's first product. To properly welcome Derrell to the Team, we offer up the following questions taken from a short email interview.

• So how did your work with startups lead into developing Samba?

  I needed a way to easily access Windows shares from Linux. "mount -t smb" had proven to be unreliable, with frequent hangs of the Linux machine and an inability to access certain attribute information. Some of the Windows machines that I needed to access were running "older" operating systems (e.g. win98), so "mount -t cifs" wouldn't work for me. I discovered smbwrapper and smbsh, but it no longer worked on Linux and everything I read in the list archives said that it wouldn't work any more because the glibc folks had removed external access to the internal interface that smbwrapper had depended on. When I'm told "it wont work", my first reaction is typically either "Why not?" or "I can make it work!" :-) So I re-implemented smbwrapper and smbsh using libsmbclient and dynamic linking of the C library functions. It was a fun project, and got me into learning more about libsmbclient.

• How long have you been submitting patches to Samba?

  My first patch was submitted about 3 years ago, I think. I have not submitted numerous patches, but some have been fairly involved and, I believe, well tested prior to submission.

  I submitted my rewrite of smbwrapper/smbsh a few times, but it is really libsmbclient example code, and was never of sufficient priority to make it into the tree. I fixed that as one of my first tasks as a team member! It's now in the SAMBA_3_0 tree under examples/libsmbclient/smbwrapper.

• What will you be working on now that you are part of the Team?

  I was brought in to help maintain libsmbclient. Since providing better ways to access Windows machines from Unix/Linux is my primary interest here, that seems fitting.