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Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 16:13:25 -0700
From: Jeremy Allison <jallison@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com>
To: "nicholas@petreley.com" <nicholas@petreley.com>,
Subject: [Fwd: Open Benchmark Invitation]

FYI: My response to Mindcraft's "Open Benchmark" invitation.

Regards,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.


Bruce Weiner wrote:
> I have posted an Open Benchmark Invitation at our Web site.  It's at
> http://www.mindcraft.com/openbenchmark.html and there is a link off our home
> page.

Bruce,

        As we have previously discussed on the phone, I
have a big problem with the "Open Benchmark" requirement
that :

"3.The tests will use Windows 9x clients (these can be in any mix
including all clients using the same Windows 9x OS). The same client
set up will be used for both Linux and Windows NT Server."

In order to participate, I must insist that Windows NT
clients are *also* benchmarked.

I feel that it is very much in the interest of consumers
to be able to choose between clients, and surely Microsoft
would be interested in publishing the results of their
flagship workstation operating system, running against
their flagship server, using their flagship filesystem.

I insist that we also have NT clients running against
NT server and Samba servers, using an NTFS filesystem
on NT, and an equivelant secure filesystem (ext2fs) on
Linux added to the mix.

There are no problems running Win9x clients against NT
using whatever file system you wish as well, but not
also showing the NT client data is *extremely* disingenuous,
as I'm sure you already know.

Your original benchmark was funded by, and on behalf of
Microsoft, run in their labs (as you have now revealed).
This new benchmark is different, and is a joint effort
between Microsoft and the Open Source community to publish
meaningful numbers to allow consumer choice. In order to
be able to use our names on this we must have some input
into the benchmarking specifications.

If you refuse to consider this important addition to the
matrix I will have no option but to publicly refuse to
participate, and publish our own Win9x client to NT or Samba
server, and WinNT client to NT or Samba server benchmark
matrix, and let our own credibility be assessed by the public.

Regards,

        Jeremy Allison,
        Samba Team.

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