What's new in Samba 4 alpha7 ============================ 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 this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above. Samba4 alpha7 follows on from the alpha release series we have been publishing since September 2007 WARNINGS ======== Samba4 alpha7 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 Directory domain, Samba4 is happier as a domain controller, and it is in this role where it has seen deployment into production. Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an automated basis, we have found Samba4 to be very stable in it's 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. If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba4, you should backup all configuration and data. NEW FEATURES ============ Samba4 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join and domain logon operations with these clients. Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS. We correctly generate the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we issue. The new VFS features in Samba 4 adapts the filesystem on the server to match the Windows client semantics, allowing Samba 4 to better match windows behaviour and application expectations. This includes file annotation information (in streams) and NT ACLs in particular. The VFS is backed with an extensive automated test suite. A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals. The Samba 4 architecture is based around an LDAP-like database that can use a range of modular backends. One of the backends supports standards compliant LDAP servers (including OpenLDAP), and we are working on modules to map between AD-like behaviours and this backend. We are aiming for Samba 4 to be powerful frontend to large directories. CHANGES SINCE alpha6 ===================== In the time since Samba4 alpha6 was released in Janurary 2009, Samba has continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas (in no particular order): OpenLDAP Multi Master Replication can now also replicate the OpenLDAP configuration itself. Support for Windows 7 beta as a member of the Samba4 domain Issues with the nesting of LDB transactions have been fixed A number of internal libraries (tevent, auth in particular has been updated for easier use outside Samba4 spoolss IDL updates to bring Samba3 to use PIDL code, and to merge the corrected IDL back into Samba4 Fixes to allow use of C++ compilers and to increase portability These are just some of the highlights of the work done in the past month. More details can be found in our GIT history. CHANGES ======= Those familiar with Samba 3 can find a list of user-visible changes since that release series in the NEWS file. KNOWN ISSUES ============ - Domain member support is in it's infancy, and is not comparable to the support found in Samba3. - There is no printing support in the current release. - There is no NetBIOS browsing support in the current release - The Samba4 port of the CTDB clustering support is not yet complete - 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 alphas are partly to assist with this problem). - Samba4 alpha7 is currently only portable to recent Linux distributions. Work to return support for other Unix varients is expected during the next alpha cycles RUNNING Samba4 ============== A short guide to setting up Samba 4 can be found in the howto.txt file in root of the tarball. DEVELOPMENT and FEEDBACK ======================== 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. The Samba Wiki at http://wiki.samba.org should detail some of these development plans. Development and general discussion about Samba 4 happens mainly on the #samba-technical IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) and the samba-technical mailing list (see http://lists.samba.org/ for details).