This may wind up the shortest entry to date - yet I hope as valuable as any other post.

Several months ago I switched the host OS on my laptop - from Windows XP to Gentoo Linux. One of my many reasons for doing so was the ease of maintaining a performant system under Linux (esp. Gentoo). All those Windows services we so very rarely use add up to wasted memory and processor.

My Gentoo installation is loaded with only those components I regularly use. Recently I needed to crunch some financial figures. A calculator was not installed on my system but Ruby was! And that leads me to maybe the best calculator of all...

This is a quick reminder: you don't need Samba client if all that is required is mounting SMB shares.

Mac OS X comes configured with Samba support - but your Linux distro may should not.

As long as you have compiled CIFS support (either module or kernel) then simply...

$ sudo mount -t cifs -o "username=bob,password=***,domain=corp" //10.1.10.10/docs /mnt/docs/

I almost categorized this entry under Development: it demonstrates the YAGNI principle in action. Just as we must trust our abilities to adapt in development, equally we benefit from waiting until need presents itself before fattening up our host OSes.