WHATS NEW IN 1.9.17alpha5 - July 31st 1997. ========================================== Last Alpha before full release. ------------------------------- It is our intention that 1.9.17alpha5 be the last alpha before the full 1.9.17 release. If you are concerned that Samba 1.9.17 compile cleanly out of the box on your platform please try 1.9.17alpha5 and make sure it compiles for your particular platform. Please let samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au know if you have problems. The differences between 1.9.17alpha4 and 1.9.17alpha5 are mainly tidying code to ensure portability over different platforms (although some new code has been added). Thanks to Cisco for the new netbios alias code support. Improved browsing support. -------------------------- Samba now should support propagation of browse lists across subnets correctly. Look in the file docs/BROWSING.txt as it has been largely re-written to explain how to do this. *IMPORTANT* All Samba servers acting as local/domain master browsers must be running 1.9.17alpha3 (or later). Thanks to Silicon Graphics for allowing us to test the new code on their corporate network. Improved share mode handling ---------------------------- The handling of share modes has been completely rewritten. Samba can now run agressive PC Benchmarks (Ziff-Davis NetBench) correctly with many hundreds of concurrent PC's. The confidence level on share mode handling in Samba is now much higher than it was previously. PC database packages should be much safer when run against a Samba share. Thanks to Silicon Graphics for testing this code for us. If at all possible compile Samba to use the new share mode handling with shared memory (set the flags FAST_SHARE_MODES in the Makefile). This will be *much* faster than old file-based share modes. FAST_SHARE_MODES have been turned on by default on the following platforms in the Makefile : Linux Solaris BSDI IRIX 5.x.x FreeBSD Updated smb.conf documentation ------------------------------ All options are now documented we believe. Many bugfixes and improvements ------------------------------ From around the 'net around the world. Many thanks to everyone who contributed. Some of the changes since alpha4 are: *** Alias names for Samba servers. *** Fixes for smbtar. *** New "follow symlinks" option can prevent any symlink following for security reasons. *** Authentication for Kerberos 5 clients (note that this is not the same as the Kerberos 5 Microsoft will be using, that has not yet been documented). *** smbpasswd can now add users to the smbpasswd file. *** Hex dump style of debug packets. Remaining known issues with cross-subnet browsing. -------------------------------------------------- When nmbd is acting as a WINS server it doesn't handle de-registering of members of a WORKGROUP<1e> name correctly. The first machine to de-register will remove the name. This should be fixed in a later release when group names are handled correctly in the WINS code. Remember - this is new code so there may be bugs or problems. As always, all bugs are our responsibility - please report them to : samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au Regards, The Samba Team.