Krishna Ganugapati’s Weblog

In the course of building a new software system, there are these inflection points when everything comes together. Last week was one such inflection point. Here are the highlights
- Windows explorer, dir, Acrobat reader, thumbnails views on explorer all work
- copying files, deleting files, drag and drop, xcopies are all smooth and seamless
- Word now works – we can click on a Word document on a share and we can open the document and edit it
- Multiple connections and multiple large file downloads work smoothly
- We’ve set up an internal file server that hosts over half a terrabyte of data (with full iso OS images and VMs) and are using this as our internal dog food server.
- The MMC share management snapin and wizard works smoothly; we can point MMC at our Linux server create, delete and manage shares on the server.
- The installation is very simple. There is next to nothing to configure and setup. Install the bits and you have a file server available.

The month of March promises to be very interesting for us. I’ll write another post on what we plan on accomplishing by end of March.

Thanks for reading

It has been a super productive week.

First the highlights. The lwio SMB File Server has hugely advanced. Most operations from the Windows XP command line work. Copying files, xcopying, making directories, net use, net use /del, single sign-on are all fully operational. In addition, the Windows explorer is almost completely functional. We’ve yet to support server-side file change notifications (i.e changes to the remote directory are not immediately visible in the Windows Explorer, the simple workaround is to hit the refresh button). You can view thumbnails of pictures and photographs, you can bring up notepad on a file directly. In all, we have a pretty useful file server.

Today we plan on starting internal dog-fooding. We will be hosting our own server and placing large size OS iso images which we use, so that everyone in the engineering team can upload/download files to the server. We’re putting all our VMs as well on the server and will subject the server to a significant amount of stress.

The day is not yet done. It is 8:38 hrs PST out here in Bellevue WA. We plan to have the file share management work done by end of day today. This will allow us to create file shares on the Likewise SMB File Server via MMC’s Add Share Wizard. Also, we plan on add a File Management plugin on the Likewise Administrators Console that will allow Linux Administrators to graphically manage their own Linux Likewise File Servers from Linux desktops.

Its been a good week!