WHATS NEW IN 1.9.18alpha10 Nov 1st 1997 ======================================= This is NOT a production release of Samba code. For production servers please run Samba 1.9.17p4 or later releases in the 1.9.17 series. This release contains some experimental features and changes and is being made available so people can test and provide feedback and patches for ongoing Samba development. Please note that only the Domain controller code is truly experimental. The other changes have been extensively tested and are of the same quality as normal Samba alpha releases. The Domain controller code is disabled in the Makefile by default and is being made available to Samba programmers in the interests of advancing a public implementation of this important protocol. This release contains three major changes to the 1.9.17 series and much re-written code. The main changes are : 1). Oplock support now operational. ----------------------------------- Samba now supports 'exclusive' and 'batch' oplocks. These are an advanced networked file system feature that allows clients to obtain a exclusive use of a file. This allows a client to cache any changes it makes locally, and greatly improves performance. Windows NT has this feature and prior to this release this was one of the reasons Windows NT could be faster in some situations. The oplock code in Samba has been extensively tested and is believed to be completely stable. Please report any problems to the samba-bugs alias. 2). Experimental Primary Domain controller code. ------------------------------------------------ Samba now contains a *VERY* experimental client and server implementation of part of the Windows NT 4.x Domain Controller specification, as published by Paul Ashton (now a Samba Team member). This code is not enabled in the Makefile by default, and to work on this code you must read the file : docs/NTDOMAIN.txt Please note that as this code is not complete, it is being made available as part of this release to allow interested parties to contribute and help the Samba Team in documenting and implementing this important feature. Please do not expect to be able to replace your NT Domain Controllers with Samba until this code is finished, tested and an announcement is made. At present the Domain Controller code is for programmers and people interested in Microsoft protocols only. 3). New Internationalization support. ------------------------------------- With this release Samba no longer needs to be separately compiled for Japanese (Kanji) support, the same binary will serve both Kanji and non-Kanji clients. A new method of dynamically loading client code pages has been added to allow the case insensitivity to be done dependent on the code page of the client. Note that Samba still will only handle one client code page at a time. This will be fixed when Samba is fully UNICODE enabled. Please see the new man page for make_smbcodepage for details on adding additional client code page support. Changed code. ------------- Samba no longer needs the libdes library to support encrypted passwords. Samba now contains a restricted version of DES that can only be used for authentication purposes (to comply with the USA export encryption regulations and to allow USA Mirror sites to carry Samba source code). The 'encrypt passwords' parameter may now be used without recompiling. Much of the internals of Samba has been re-structured to support the oplock and Domain controller changes. The WINS client and WINS server capabilities in nmbd are also being restructured, to make it easier to understand and maintain. Samba supports the NT 3.51 and 4.0 Domain Authentication Protocol to a degree sufficient to download Profiles to an NT 3.51 or 4.0 Workstation ("Welcome to the SAMBA Domain"). There is also code in smbclient to generate the same requests as an NT Workstation would when doing an NT Domain Logon. This has only been tested against a Samba "Experimental" PDC so far. Some of the new parameters for NT Domain Logons and Profile support are now also used by the Win95 Domain Logons and Profile support. The Automount code has been slightly reshuffled, such that the home directory (and profile location) can be specified by \\%N\homes and \\%N\homes\profiles respectively, which are the defaults for these values. If -DAUTOMOUNT is enabled, then %N is the server component of the user's NIS auto.home entry. Obviously, you will need to be running Samba on the user's home server as well as the one they just logged in on. New parameters in smb.conf. --------------------------- New Global parameters. ---------------------- Documented in the smb.con man pages : "bind interfaces only" "username level" "domain sid" "domain groups" "logon drive" "logon home" Not yet documented in the smb.conf man page, please read docs/NTDOMAIN.txt or examine the source code for information on the next parameters : "domain other sids" "domain admin users" "domain guest users" New Share level parameters. --------------------------- Documented in the smb.con man pages : "delete veto files" "oplocks" Reporting bugs. --------------- If you have problems, or think you have found a bug please email a report to : samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au Please state the version number of Samba that you are running, and *full details* of the steps we need to reproduce the problem. As always, all bugs are our responsibility. Regards, The Samba Team.