WHATS NEW IN Samba 2.0.0 beta1 ============================== This is a MAJOR new release of Samba, the UNIX based SMB/CIFS file and print server for Windows systems. There have been many changes in Samba since the last major release, 1.9.18. These have mainly been in the areas of performance and SMB protocol correctness. In addition, a Web based GUI interface for configuring Samba has been added. In addition, Samba has been re-written to help portability to other POSIX-based systems, based on the GNU autoconf tool. Major changes in Samba 2.0 -------------------------- There are many major changes in Samba for version 2.0. Here are some of them: ===================================================================== 1). Speed --------- Samba has been benchmarked on high-end UNIX hardware as out-performing all other SMB/CIFS servers using the Ziff-Davis NetBench benchmark. Many changes to the code to optimise high-end performance have been made. 2). Correctness --------------- Samba now supports the Windows NT specific SMB requests. This means that on platforms that are capable Samba now presents a 64 bit view of the filesystem to Windows NT clients and is capable of handling very large files. 3). Portability --------------- Samba is now self-configuring using GNU autoconf, removing the need for people installing Samba to have to hand configure Makefiles, as was needed in previous versions. You now configure Samba by running "./configure" then "make". See docs/textdocs/UNIX_INSTALL.txt for details. 4). Web based GUI configuration ------------------------------- Samba now comes with SWAT, a web based GUI config system. See the swat man page for details on how to set it up. 5). Cross protocol data integrity --------------------------------- An open function interface has been defined to allow "opportunistic locks" (oplocks for short) granted by Samba to be seen by other UNIX processes. This allows complete cross protocol (NFS and SMB) data integrety using Samba with platforms that support this feature. 6). Domain client capability ---------------------------- Samba is now capable of using a Windows NT PDC for user authentication in exactly the same way that a Windows NT workstation does, i.e. it can be a member of a Domain. See docs/textdocs/DOMAIN_MEMBER.txt for details. 7). Documentation Updates ------------------------- All the reference parts of the Samba documentation (the manual pages) have been updated and converted to a document format that allows automatic generation of HTML, SGML, and text formats. These documents now ship as standard in HTML and manpage format. ===================================================================== NOTE - Some important option defaults changed --------------------------------------------- Several parameters have changed their default values. The most important of these is that the default security mode is now user level security rather than share level security. This (incompatible) change was made to ease new Samba installs as user level security is easier to use for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT clients. ********IMPORTANT NOTE**************** If you have no "security=" line in the [global] section of your current smb.conf and you update to Samba 2.0 you will need to add the line : security=share to get exactly the same behaviour with Samba 2.0 as you did with previous versions of Samba. ********END IMPORTANT NOTE************* In addition, Samba now defaults to case sensitivity options that match a Windows NT server precisely, that is, case insensitive but case preserving. ===================================================================== NOTE - Primary Domain Controller Functionality ---------------------------------------------- This version of Samba contains code that correctly implements the undocumented Primary Domain Controller authentication protocols. However, there is much more to being a Primary Domain Controller than serving Windows NT logon requests. A useful version of a Primary Domain Controller contains many remote procedure calls to do things like enumerate users, groups, and security information, only some of which Samba currently implements. For this reason we have chosen not to advertise and actively support Primary Domain Controller functionality with this release. This work is being done in the CVS (developer) versions of Samba, development of which continues at a fast pace. If you are interested in participating in or helping with this development please join the Samba-NTDOM mailing list. Details on joining are available at : http://samba.org/listproc/ Details on obtaining CVS (developer) versions of Samba are available at: http://samba.org/cvs.html ===================================================================== If you have problems, or think you have found a bug please email a report to : samba-bugs@samba.org As always, all bugs are our responsibility. Regards, The Samba Team.