-What's new in Samba 4 alpha6
-============================
+What's new in Samba 4 alpha14
+=============================
Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being
-developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in
+developed in parallel to the stable 3.x series. The main emphasis in
this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used
by Windows 2000 and above.
-Samba4 alpha6 follows on from the alpha release series we have been
-publishing since September 2007
+Samba4 alpha14 follows on from the alpha release series we have been
+publishing since September 2007.
WARNINGS
========
-Samba4 alpha6 is not a final Samba release. That is more a reference
+Samba4 alpha14 is not a final Samba release. That is more a reference
to Samba4's lack of the features we expect you will need than a
statement of code quality, but clearly it hasn't seen a broad
deployment yet. If you were to upgrade Samba3 (or indeed Windows) to
Samba4, you would find many things work, but that other key features
you may have relied on simply are not there yet.
-For example, while Samba 3.0 is an excellent member of a Active
+For example, while Samba 3 is an excellent member of a Active
Directory domain, Samba4 is happier as a domain controller, and it is
in this role where it has seen deployment into production.
behaviour. We have to recommend against upgrading production servers
from Samba 3 to Samba 4 at this stage, because there may be the features on
which you may rely that are not present, or the mapping of
-your configuration and user database may not be complete.
+your configuration and user database may not be complete.
If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba4, you should
backup all configuration and data.
We are aiming for Samba 4 to be powerful frontend to large
directories.
-CHANGES SINCE Alpha5
+CHANGES SINCE alpha13
=====================
-In the time since Samba4 Alpha5 was released in June 2008, Samba has
-continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas:
+We have continued our commitment to provide a full DRS implementation for our
+AD implementation and therefore achieved also this time big steps forward.
- The source code for various libraries that are used by both Samba 3 and
- Samba 4 are now shared between the two rather than duplicated
- (and being slightly diverged).
+Our progress on DRS is being tracked in the Samba wiki:
+http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4_DRS_TODO_List
-These are just some of the highlights of the work done in the past few
-months. More details can be found in our GIT history.
+Beside this the release includes (among a lot of other things):
+* a script for backuping production provision
+Although still in development, samba4 is already used in a couple of production sites
+and such kind of use case is intensifying. This script is intendended for administrators
+to allow them to make a periodic backup of the provision in case of problem.
CHANGES
=======
- Clock Synchronisation is critical. Many 'wrong password' errors are
actually due to Kerberos objecting to a clock skew between client
- and server. (The NTP work in the previous alpha is partly to assist
+ and server. (The NTP work in the previous alphas are partly to assist
with this problem).
-- Samba4 alpha6 is currently only portable to recent Linux
- distributions. Work to return support for other Unix varients is
- expected during the next alpha cycle
+- The DRS replication code fails, and is very new
-- Samba4 alpha6 is incompatible with GnuTLS 2.0, found in Fedora 9 and
- recent Ubuntu releases. GnuTLS use may be disabled using the
- --disable-gnutls argument to ./configure. (otherwise 'make test' and
- LDAPS operations will hang).
+- Users upgrading existing databases to Samba4 should carefully
+ consult upgrading-samba4.txt. We have made a number of changes in
+ this release that should make it easier to upgrade in future.
+ Btw: there exists also a script under the "setup" directory of the
+ source distribution called "upgrade_from_s3" which should allow a step-up
+ from Samba3 to Samba4. It's not included yet in the binary distributions
+ since it's completely experimental!
RUNNING Samba4
==============
DEVELOPMENT and FEEDBACK
========================
+
+We need your help! Projects as Samba 4 live from the community feedback. If you
+provide expressive bug reports, some documentation snippets on the wiki or some
+real code patches - all is appreciated if it meets our quality criterias. Here
+you can find further references:
+
Bugs can be filed at https://bugzilla.samba.org/ but please be aware
-that many features are simply not expected to work at this stage.
+that many features are simply not expected to work at this stage.
The Samba Wiki at http://wiki.samba.org should detail some of these
development plans.